Post #599650 by tigertail777 on Thu, Jul 28, 2011 12:10 PM

Been lurking round these parts for a long time, figured I should perhaps chime in once in a while and be more active. This particular topic is near and dear my heart so it is as good a place to start as any.

I personally do not like digitally created art for the most part, because most of the art I have seen is from people who have no background in using real world tools FIRST. While I agree that digital is another tool in the toolbox, it should not be the ONLY tool, just as "real world" tools should not be your only tool: you should always use the tools that make for the best piece of art. But I truly worry about the next generation of artists with less grounding in real world tools, it is perfectly fine if they can't master those tools I understand no one can master everything, but I think it is terribly important to have first hand knowledge of tools, especially if you are trying to emulate them in another medium. Let's face it most digital paint is trying to emulate the real world equivalent of oils, or acrylics or watercolors etc, but how can you possibly be true to the look of the medium if you have no first hand knowledge of it? You should know from personal experience how those tools handle, what they are capable of and not capable of or you will never get that emulation correct no matter how hard you try. If you have removed yourself from learning that step you are farther away from being true to the medium, and how many steps removed are you if you are copying the style of another digital artist who also may previously have had no real experience in what they are emulating? A copy of a copy degenerates with each copy, it is true in both digital and the real world.

Now all that is fine and good if you are not trying to emulate the real world equivalent and trying to instead invent a new medium, but if that is so then don't constrain yourself to the tenets of the old medium: you cannot be both and call yourself one or the other.

I have a degree in animation that I had hoped to use for drawing 2D animation with traditional methods of hand drawing frame by frame. But right before I graduated I saw the writing on the wall and wrote a final thesis of how 3D animation would be replacing the traditional hand drawn animation, and using more and more cheats like motion capture that look "okay" but do not have the mastery of form that drawn animation has always possessed. My classmates and the teacher all thought it was ridiculous to believe that the hand drawn animation would become extinct or nearly so due to computers and 3D animation, they pointed out that Disney at least would ALWAYS have hand drawn animation. My worries were groundless and I was a fool...or was I?

Now increasingly you will only find flash style animation even on TV, where the tweens are done by a computer that has no personal experience or knowledge of what it is trying to emulate. This would be alright if it was used only as a tool and the animator had the final say on how the final product looked, but it used as a tool to compress time, not to make for better art. So they rely on the "knowledge" of the computer to do tweens (drawing the frames between the key drawings) to save time, and I am sorry the result may be passable but is aesthetically terrible. Even the old APA, and minimalist animation like "Gerald Mcboing Boing" has more life to it, because the animators had hands on knowledge of emulating the real thing. Yes, they were using a minimalist shorthand to show that life but they knew the subject enough to capture it in those few "strokes". As I said, I think it is fine to use a computer for a tool, just be damned sure it is not the only tool in your box.

The one main thing however that I think terrifies most people about digital art, and some may not even be able to vocalize it they just "sense it" is the impermanence of the medium. How can you possibly save it in it's purest form for future generations and KNOW with certainty you have done everything possible to make it last? I have tried backing up art on burned DVD's and CD's both of which I have been told compared to original art have a relatively short life without making another backup. I know from experience the devastation caused by believing in the permanence of a backup and having it fail. I had some great photos from one of my few trips to Disneyland, ones I was very proud of capturing. I dutifully backed up those photos on not one but two DVD's believing that if one failed I would have the other. I lost a lot of irreplaceable
photos from that trip because BOTH DVD's on separate occasions developed a case of what used to be called "cd rot" where essentially a tiny tiny hole in the disc from manufacturing is there but can't really be seen, and every time the laser goes over it to play it, burns that hole bigger burning away data. I called the manufacturer of the DVD's and was told I got a "bad batch" how is that explanation going to replace my beautiful photos? I now have external hard drives crammed with my creations that I am terrified will fail. I have heard horror stories from fellow graphic designers about even the most high tech and latest hard drives failing so catastrophically that some of their art was lost permanently. And this is all happening in the same generation it was created! God only knows what will happen to it all farther in the future. Imagine all the art and knowledge that will be lost if it does. This is why I am very uneasy about going all digital for anything. At one time I wanted to be an archaeologist because I love old cultures and the creations from them, I love seeing the steps and humanity involved in how they lived and created. I also feel that in order to progress we must learn from the past. The idea of losing any of our history through our own laziness scares the living bejesus out of me. Any technology that is used solely for the compression of time is a bad one: witness the micro fiche that libraries became so enamored over that they tossed out entire collections and replaced them with a very substandard and degraded copy, to the point that some of those copies are really almost unreadable making the entire point of the idea moot. Now they are doing the same because of the internet: they reason that they don't need the books taking up the space anymore and can save time and money by having less people take care of them and all of that knowledge is on the internet anyhow. But where is the backup plan if something happens to the internet? Nothing is infallible especially something like the internet where webpages consistently come and go. What will happen to all the knowledge accumulated here on TC if it ever (God forbid) goes down?

When it comes to art, the best back up is the real thing: you can always make more copies off an original without much degradation, but the more copies you make of a copy the more degradation with each new copy until it may be quite far removed from the true original. Original art also in general ages far better than copies, even the highest standard of lithographs will age much faster than a properly cared for original.

Well that is my two cents.