Post #597138 by GROG on Tue, Jul 12, 2011 3:21 AM

Yay! Now we're talking! Great observations by a number of artists and and art enthusiasts alike. GROG especially glad to hear from Tobor, Doug Horne, Thor Aloha Station, etc.on the subject since they do both handmade and digital art and combinations thereof.

GROG believe that In the end, digital art IS just another medium. You can play with clay, pastels, colored pencils, wood carving, stone carving, photography, oil paints, airbrush, enamels, collage, paper mache, airbrush, glass blowing, styrofoam, scrimshaw, watercolor, welding, digital, CNC machine, or maybe you want to wrap an island in fabric, etc. etc. etc., but in the end you have to find the medium that best helps you create the vision in your head. Every medium has properties and characteristics that make that medium unique unto itself. Wood carvings can crack, and rot, and fade in the sun, but that is the nature of that medium. Stone is hard, oil paintings are flat, films move, etc. Digital art may have a "coldness", but that's not necessarily bad, that's just a characteristic of that particular medium. As man has developed, technology and innovations have lead to new ways to create art faster and more efficient and the computer is leading the way into the future of creating art. It is a tool just like a pencil, a paintbrush, a chisel, etc. You still have to learn how to use it and practice on it until you can get it to do what you want it to do to create what you want to create. The artists eye is the final factor in deciding what the end product will look like.

But still, GROG can understand the desire to have the original piece straight from the artists' hand. The old way of animating, you had development artists and designers who developed the look of the film. Storyboard artists who plotted out the story and staging of the film. You had animators who did the rough animation, then you had clean-up artists who took the rough animation and put it on model, and gave it a single cleaned-up line, and then you had inkers and cel painters who put the animation onto cels which were then shot on film. All of the artists were extremely talented and had developed the necessary skills for their part of the animation process. So, when GROG buy animation art, GROG prefer to get the rough animation drawings, because the animators were the ones who initially breathed life into the drawings and made pencil lines on paper seem like living, solid, characters with emotions who inhabited a make believe world.