Monday, January 14, 2008

Living In The Now

I hated digital art for a long time. Like all forms of hatred, mine was born out of ignorance. Once I entered the 'professional world' I saw very quickly that I didn't stand a chance of working without embracing computers.

Having spent most of my life drawing with my hands wrapped around a tangible drawing tool, I have never had the desire to convert to digital. I actually still don't. I see many pros of working in the machine: speed, convenience, transferability, cleanliness, etc. However, for me to truly make something I have to get my hands dirty and maybe even break a sweat.

Since I started learning to use the computer as a creative medium, I have become rather infatuated with Adobe Illustrator. The reason is that I see it as a way to do things that would not be possible by hand. Hard geometry, infinite scalability, easy duplication; these are the reasons I choose to use the computer. Inevitably, though, my colleagues began and continue to encourage me to use Photoshop. I say, "Why would I use that when I can draw a real drawing with a real pencil...don't you people ever get tired of sitting on front of a computer screen? Sheesh man, you act like we were supposed to live this way; as if it's okay to do everything in your life 'virtually'. I think the real virtue is in the physical relationship between the artist and their work...blah blah blah."

Alas, the inescapable truth is that the industry (as well as many artists) favors computer-generated work for many reasons. So, here's a 'drawing' I did completely in Photoshop. Even though I did it with a modern tool, I developed it the classical way: building all the tones in grey and layering color translucently (which the great masters call glazing).

3 comments:

Vincent Gorman said...

Does this caveman arm holding a torch say something about your opinion of working this way? It may be interesting (if one had the patience) to do the same painting in as many different combinations of mediums as possible and see which turns out the strongest.

Dan from Indianapolis said...

I'm sure that would be a great exercise although I would want to try it with a more serious subject matter. I did this purely as a 'throw away' piece.

I don't know if it says anything about my feelings, I have been drawing arms randomly for years. The torch was an excuse to have a bold lightsource.

But on the topic of cavemen, they were the original humans. They invented drawing; I think that's a ;ot more impressive than inventing technology to imitate it.

Gruntone said...

yea this seems a little strange for you but i really like the lighting!, also i have a blog so check it out sometime!