Digital art discussion

Nice Thor! I downloaded it as well and it crashed once one me. Hope to get to play with it more soon!

I pushed and pulled and squeezed until I got something that looked kinda like a Tiki mask. I know many of you folks are pretty adamant about having your Tikis look like the real thing. I'm sorry, I may be old, but not old enough to know what Tikis looked like before the white invaders showed up looking for souvenirs. Also, I never know when to stop and I let my imagination take over. I ended up with this gray little guy.

The next step is to render. For those of you not familiar with 3D programs, rendering is like taking a photo of your finished work. You can control the light and shadow and even how the surface looks. I chose a cartoon like surface material with a limited poster like pallet.

Now for the part that seems to rub you traditional artist folks the wrong way so much. I started filtering in photoshop. I want to control the surface texture and color. I worked in clay long enough to know that surface treatment is a very important to a final sculpture. It was always exciting to peak in my kiln and see how those beautiful glazes sparkled on my hand made artwork. I see filtering as the same as glazing. It is surface treatment. Like in the old days when I dug clay and pulled ashes out the fireplace to make my own glazes, I try to use filters that I designed myself to create the surface of my work. I know it ain't great art but I like it.

I did another render of the same sculpture with a bit of a variation of the surface material. It is subtle but different enough to give me a different canvass to apply my texture and color magic to.

The resulting image is the same but different. It is like a loose watercolor painted on a rough surfaced wall. Is it art? Well I'm not much of and artist, so maybe not. But just think of how some of you other folks can use this program to at least practice sculpting or make models to use for reference on big real pieces. I'd love to see some of your work posted here. For more examples check out my T-shirt site. Some of the designs in the humor section of the goofy guys use sculptris' paint mode.

GENE!!! SUPER SUPER COOL!!! LOVE the "masks"...!!! I will look into the "card" and triangles issue and try that. I am not sure how to "reduce" the number of triangles...is that an option in "Sculptris". Also, regarding gettin grid of the accumulating junk data...do you mean to clean the cache on my computer...re-start..etc? Sorry if these are simple questions....I am having fun but still fairly new at digital stuff. One thing I wish was different on Sculptris is the fact you have to choose either "symetrical" sculpt or not and it's "irresversible". I would love to save time, say by sculpting in "symetrical" mode..a face. THEN...switch to asymetrical and adjust for organic differences and variations...as in real life. Do you know any way around this draw back or is that just something one has to accept?

Thanks for bringing this toy into this thread..it's a sort of "tactile" way to suggest digital art as a tool for traditional skills! I have done a lot of sculpting as well in my career and also raised, as a kid with there being a can of Play-Doe always at arms reach near the kitchen table... So this little program sitting on my lap-top is like that...if I am waking up, or clearing my brain...that grey ball of cyber clay is IRRESISTIBLE! HAaaaa

Aloha! ~~T

Thor,
First thing to do is update your "video card" drivers, then make sure you have at least 200 megabytes of free space (more is better) on your hard drive for caching.

It's true...
Cyber~playdoh!
YAY!!!

Thanks CHUCK!! Will do!!

Thor..... Sculptris like other 3D software needs lots of resources. The more memory the better. But, also some computers are more suited for use for 3D. It is often due to the graphics card. My older laptop has trouble like yours. As others suggest, new drivers may help. But saving and restarting your computer may help because it starts things fresh with no other software running. It is not a program that plays well with others.

Your problem may be that you are just playing too long and the detail becomes more than your computer can handle. Your image is made up of triangles and when you sculpt more triangles are added. Before you do anything hit the W button. You can see the triangles now because that is the wireframe mode. You can go back by hitting the button again. Do some sculpting and hit the button again. Lots of new smaller triangles and the number at the bottom left of the page gets bigger. That number can get real big, maybe in the millions. The bigger it gets the more resources you use. By reduce I meant the two reduce buttons in the tools area. One can be used as a brush to reduce triangles in some areas. You lose a little detail that way, but not much if you do it carefully. With the other one you can reduce in a selected area. It is a little more work than I like doing, but cheaper than buying a new computer.

You can do what you would like to do with symmetry. Keep it on as long as you like and change it when you want to do some detail on one side or the other. You just can't go back. If you do the program will try to make everything symmetrical again and mess up all your work. Just make sure you are done with symmetry before you switch it off and you should be OK.

Cyber Clay ...... I like that ... and play dough ... I get that too .... Gene

I posted this quite awhile back but I'll post again as this thread is relevant.

I've been 3d modelling for years and did this for a game called Zero Gear.

I have a track, based on an island, with tiki huts, palms, beaches, and a volcano shortcut/jump. I need to try and take some pics one of these days. Maybe I can dig something up...

I've often had the discussions about 'is digital art real, does it have soul?', whatever.

Who's to say. I know when I did that stuff I really enjoyed bringing tiki into a game that a lot of people could play/experience. I enjoyed doing it, and it look a lot of time.

Sure, it's not as long lasting maybe. It's a more elusive art form. Especially for games. A game could be very popular today and never gets played again after next week. And my art isn't even that great.
But to say it's not art, that it doesn't take talent, well that's completely wrong imo. I could show off tons (of other peoples) work that just blows my mind, by the detail and creativity that is put into it.

If humans cause some huge breakdown in the system, nuclear apocolypse or something you're more likely to run into art that was painted or carved than digital art. But does that make it any more/less real? Does it have less soul because it's in electrons and not atoms.
Humans have souls and they are made of both electrons and atoms.
Does the soul come from the material/tools or from the human that poured their soul into the creation of it regardless the medium?

I was at the Tiki Highway show and got talking to "Von Franco" who has been doing digital art
for a little while now, with his permission to quote him here,

Von Franco: "Digital art has made me a better artist, I have done new things in digital media,
then gone back to traditional media and learned to reproduce the same effect or look in paint, I really am enjoying digital art"

He is a very cool guy with a open mind as an artist & who really enjoyed the challenge of new things.

http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=222068

LA Center for Digital Art Juried competition

Hi all!

I'm new to the forum too -just signed up today after lurking for the last month. Think this is always a fascinating discussion and its great to watch people discovering and having fun with Sculptris.

Have to say i totally agree with all the points Gene made. I initially trained as a fine artist, then got into 3d -and now create the majority of my artwork in ZBrush (a more in-depth version of sculptris) and in other 3d packages (including photoshop) on the computer. It doesnt replace other forms of art for me, but as i work as a 3d character artist, i get to model, then paint up the characters on the computer - for me its a best of both worlds scenario. Even though its computer generated i try to make work that doesn't look obviously CG. At the same time I long ago became disillusioned with the high art/ low art divide that exists within the fine art world, because i don't believe its helpful to try to attach value judgements to different forms of art for there own sake. Ultimately i think its a shame to limit whats considered valid or acceptable because thats a path that can easily lead to artistic stagnation.

I think one of the main reasons that this sort of work has a reputation of being somehow of 'lesser value' is possibly because of the fact that a lot of the imagery you can find online is being created by amateurs without a grounding in art-history and art-theory. By its very nature the 3d community attracts a lot of teenage boys who are only just discovering and trying out what they're aesthetically into - tends to look awful, with fantasy orientated content -usually buxom females/aliens/fairies in small thongs, probably with a gun. (I call this style 'fan boy fantasy art wank'). I think its terrible, terrible stuff, but good for them! -i wouldnt begrudge another person their right to self-express, whatever their knowledge or talents - and of course everyone has to start somewhere. However, perhaps from the perspective of somebody glancing at the 3d community you might assume that's all there is to it. There is a high proportion of that sort of thing floating about, but then there are artists working in 3d that really knock your socks off. So i thought i'd post a couple of links up with some different examples for those who are interested:

http://www.scott-eaton.com/ -the guy is a master of anatomy
http://www.raycaesar.com/ -part of the lowbrow art scene - if you like Mark Ryden you may like this guy too.

I think theyre both great examples of 3d artists who show there really are no constraints when using CG.

Welcome Atomic Zombie Bastard and thanks for your contribution to the thread.

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.

And excellent points you made, too. Thanks.

Selina ..... It is nice to have a real digital artist join this discussion. Your website is fantastic. I really agreed with your take on the cyber sculpture community. Most of the work shown in the Zbrush forum drives me crazy. I like your term ... "Fan Boy Fantasy Art Wank" .... But, the other side of that is that art to others who like what they see is still art. Is a person an artist if no one else likes what you do? I love fine art, but I also love primitive art as well. That is why I visit this site. I have created some sort of artwork for most of my life. I lack training, but I have lots of life experience. I have to create. That need dominates my life. But I am no artist. I like to think of myself now a days as a digital folk artist. Like I say "Is it art? I don't know, but I like it," I like the feeling of creating. It makes me feel alive even if it brings frowns to others .....

What we're finding is that when we take the work of an arist and convert it digitally, we get a clean spot-on interpretation of the art. It's important that the art presented to us by the artist is represented in the finished sculpture, without interpretation. This is new for Tiki Farm... we are testing the waters with a few projects. I'd appreciate any/all feedback.

HOLDEN! OK NOW I see what you are referring to as "digital" art for mug aps! COOL!! This looks a lot like the stuff I am seeing done in z-brush and sculptress associated programs. Is that what made this or was it a Maya or other? NO question, an excellent tool for getting an image translated into multi dimension and built with that in mind.

I just had a few conversations with students up at Art Center a few day ago regarding all this stuff. The things up there they are creating are mind blowing. I may be back to teaching soon up there and will learn more as I teach and share what I can regarding design and storytelling in design. Digital and non. The one thing fully agreed is...the tool is no greater than the mind and idea it is guided by. If the idea or "story" is not strong and able to maintain that strength in the simplest of tools, no computer or fancy machine will make it better. You just end up with a "well polished chunk of visual noise" as one student phrased it. So, we have to explore the context.

You and I already talked on this mug, so I won't go into it too much other than if you are putting it out for open "critique" and want honest feedback in this thread my thoughts are this connected to digital context. I ask myself, What is the subject of the mug and is this telling as much of a story about the subject at first glace as possible? Is the shape and key feel doing this..before it has type on it? After that...digital art may come in and the process support a production in full dimension and support the digital tool's effectiveness. It doesn't mean more is better either. As a design problem given, it actually gets harder to boil down what makes an image or object capture a "story" or subject. "The Bahooka" to me is little round booths surrounded by aquariums, barrel lights, lots of raised grain wood textures with organic cut outs framing fish and and nautical charm. "Rufus" too...but as a character in this set work. I personally don't feel that just fish and the sea grass and bubbles and the large fish I just happen to know is Rufus cus I know the intent was that, speaks and captures "Bahooka" to me as best as it could be. Again, this is just an "artists critique" like I am used to doing and receiving and the intent is ONLY passion for an exciting "enchanting" design outcome.

I am anxious to see the prototypes on mugs sculpted this way though. If these can be put next to mugs created by human hands and hold up to the organic charm of the styles of the sculptors past that have set the standards on what we like about the look and feel of a mug. This is a fantastic tool in getting faster communication and process and I hope to see more!!

Have a great weekend all!

Digital art makes easier to improve upon somebody elses art, too. :D

HAAAAaaaaa It looks like you are on a Tiki "CRAWL" there Grog!! Hope Grog not get splinter in loin cloth and knee caps!! Thanks for helping me on this "digitally enhanced" edition! lol!

Okie Dokie!

I've been following this tread with interest, and figure it is about time I stop lurking and start conversing. :)
As many have already said - this is a big hot button topic in the art world - and I have experienced it many times in my career as an "artist".
First off - the whole scenario kind of reminds me of when I was stone carving in college. There were two camps back then in the sculpture studio: hand-chisel only, and pneumatic tools. Hand chisel folks felt that air tools took the soul and thought out of the work, and air tool guys took advantage of the speed the tool gave them, and the fact that it let them do more work. I was an air-tool guy. In fact, I feel if I went back in time and offered Michelangelo a compressor and a set of high grade carving bits the last thing he's do is refuse them because they lacked soul. I tend to think he'd embrace them because A) he was a businessman and needed to make deadlines on commissions, and B) he was a creator, and the tool would let him create more work in his limited time on earth. For me, digital art is very similar to the old stone-carver debate.

For those who don't know, the majority of my "day job" time is spent creating on a computer. I do illustration, animation, and game design for web, TV, and iPad/iPhone. I can tell you that I NEVER thought I'd be using a computer for art. It was old-school traditional media in college, and spent years in Hollywood making monsters with old-fasioned latex and silicone. It just turned out that I found I could create so much faster - and experiment so much more - on a computer when producing 2D art. Now, this comes with a variety of caveats. I'm producing commercial work - so time is of the essence, the work I'm doing is not meant to stand the test of time, etc. For many years I would do my preliminary sketches and boards on paper - but lately I find it faster to just draw everything on the computer. If the final work will be viewed digitally - it is easier for me to start digitally.

SO - does the digital work I do have "soul"? I dunno. I'd say the commercial nature of the work - not the digital medium it is created with - has more bearing on its artistic merit. I think digital image creating software is a medium just like paint, clay, or wood - and it is the way the medium is used that defines the work - not the medium itself. A few years ago I was teaching a digital design and animation class at a high school, and I asked the studio art teacher where my students work would be shown at the upcoming art festival. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, "oh, but that stuff isn't art." sigh...

Of course, as much as I love the computer, I still like to get my hands dirty with clay. Ceramics and metal casting has a permanence that digital work can never approach, and I love the idea that something I make will be around for many many years after I am gone. Sure - someday when 3D printers get a bit cheaper and the resolution gets a bit better, I'll get one and play with it, but only as a tool to bring my ideas out of my head and into the real world - just like pencils, photoshop, and a lump of clay.

Great thread, Grog!
Henrik "VanTiki"

Well, I had to skip the last couple post 'cause I've had a few...
Just went to and old school punk rock reunion gig that some friends from way back had.. Just saw a gig poster a few weeks ago ...

And one of the guys asked me 'You still doing art'...

And it's funny, because I've been doing a lot of digital art that a lot of people have enjoyed over the past 10 years. But when it comes down to it I really have nothing to 'show' for it.
Sure I could load up an old game, run someone around it, show them the art I have done. And most likely they wouldn't appreciate it. Because it's 'not art', or at least not 'traditional' art. And it certainly isn't timeless art.

But a lot of people have enjoyed it, and actually my artwork is still used in new projects today, in an antiquated engine that few people use. But after all this time people are still seeing it, and most likely not even knowing who created it. And I'm alright with that.

But it got me thinking. Does that make it have less soul than something Devinchi did?
I did it for peoples enjoyment, and was successful in that respect.

And back to my friend asking if I still did artwork. In all the years I have practiced many mediums I have probably only made $100 off of my artwork. I could just never sell it. If someone liked it I gave it to them. And that's what I've always done with my digital art.

I think once money gets involved it loses soul to me. And it's a weird justopizction (I know I should spell check that) but whatever, I'm drunk. LOL.
But whenever I do art for free it flows, whenever someone offers me money (or I think about doing it for money) I hit a brick wall and can never finish.

So back to the question of soul and art. Does art have soul because of the medium? Or does it have soul because of the (oh what's the word...) expected outcome?
Certainly the great artists (I'm not comparing myself) of the pasts had no intentions of becoming wealthy from art. Most died paupers, and only the people that hoarded their work became rich.

It's quite the conundrum. As an artist I'd love to be able to survive doing what I love, but the moment I start doing it TO survive it loses all meaning and I start to loathe it.
So maybe for me digital art is the perfect medium, people enjoy it, then it's gone. I won't become rich off of it, but nobody else will either.

Not really sure where I was going with this little rant...

Always great to see some Digital work here on TC.

I thought I would share how I create my digital pieces. There are so many ways to work in the digital medium like 3D modeling, paint outside of the computer and manipulating that in a paint program etc. etc. Below is a step by step on how I work. I'll try not to bore you with the details.

I always start with sketches on paper, usually rough, developing the character and thinking about composition. Below is my rough sketch I started with.

Not all of the time but I sometimes will do a more finished drawing. It gives me an original to sell and I start thinking about color schemes at this point.

At this point I scan the drawing and bring that into Illustrator. I bring it in as a template, breaking it down to basic shapes, keeping it flat and graphic, thinking more about color scheme and adding more elements to the piece. Below is the illustrator file.

Now the fun begins! I like to separate the elements into separate files so all I have left are the background pieces. I work from the back forward bringing in pieces as I paint. If the file is getting too big I will sometimes paint an element in it's own file. Not a fan of doing that because you need to see how the element is working within the overall scene. Below is a detail of the overall piece.

Another detail of the finished piece.

Here is the full image done and ready to go. Size is 16"X12", 300 dpi, 49meg, 11 layers and 25 channels. I use the channels saving off selections so I can easily load a selection to re-work an area. Otherwise it would be a nightmare to try and re-select an area after you have rendered it.

Hope you enjoyed my step by step process.
Cheers!

Doug .... Thanks for the step by step. It really shows folks how much digital art is really so much like other art, just different tools. Nice work ....

and i thought you had elves doin all that stuff!
Thanks Douggles, for the tutorial!

Hi Doug, This was a terrific lesson on digital art and how you get to the end. Loved it, Wendy

I dont know much about digital art but I do know it is very time consuming and it takes the same type of artistic talent that most other art media takes to do it right.. But it can have a real stale look in the wrong hands.. I prefer hand painted over digital but it definitely has its place our modern world. I had to pack up my carving and painting supplies a few years back and I decided try my hand at some digital painting in Photoshop.Thes were my first attempts.I think I worked on these for around 40 hours And I think I forgot everything I learned along the way, but they were fun and I may do some more digital stuff in the future.


close up

Looks like Kirby killed this thread. :lol:

That's a great step-by-step Doug. Thanks for posting it.

GROG working on TV show, DAN VS. on the HUB Network. It is a FLASH Show and EVERYTHING we do is done digitally on the computer. Storyboards are done in FLASH and Photoshop. There are a couple of designers that rough out on paper, but do the finished art on the computer. Backgrounds are totally digitally painted. We have such a small budget and crew, if it wasn't for the computer we'd never be able to do this show and get this kind of quality for this low of a budget.

Love the computer. Hate the computer.

Oh my GOD! the thread has resurfaced.

I prefer listening to a virtuoso playing a Stradivarius live in front of me than to listening to the electronic version (or whatever) of it. Impossible to beat that original source known to men as Violin.
Same goes with art. No digital print will EVER match the magic of a cool ink on paper cartoon. One where you can see/touch/taste/feel the volume of the lines of thick black ink over the white spotless paper that where put there by a hand, just like your hand, but with an incredible skill... Or the dripping paintings of Jackson Pollock. Action painting. The idea is to imagine him doing his thing. Going crazy in the process of manufacturing an art object. It's not so cool to think about an artist as someone who spends his life in front of a computer. That is too mundane now. People want to see chips flying and paint being dripped. They want to experiment the un edited reality. No photoshop, no electric cathodic rays of light piercing your eyeballs. People want the real thing. Pure and uncut.
As long as digital tools don't have a Physical presence in this "real" world, a print will never beat the actual object. We can sculpt that into stone. It's like that and that's the way it is! You can take that to the bank!
In my own humble opinion
Viva la verdadera arte!
Z

Zeta, You have already voiced this same diatribe earlier in the thread
why must you keep haranguing us over & over again.

You miss the point completely "That a good Artist can make real art in any medium"
You don't like digital art, we get that, but it does not account for all the crap
that has been hand painted on real canvas also, now does it?

Art is subjective and as much as anyone of us may dislike it, That does not disqualify
it as Art.

So in my "own personal opinion" "Jackson Pollock was a very overrated & unstable hack"
Van Gogh, Cézanne & Monet all splattered paint on canvas, they called it splattered paint,
then moved onto context & subject in their work.

But others like you, enjoy Splattered paint, C'est, ce que c'est!

Chuck Tatum is whatever. You bore me to tears. Speak for yourself. Drop the mob mentality. Where did you came from? What are you about? What is your contribution to this site? Why don't you stay in bilge and tikishout where you like it so much? Besides, you are not an artist, you have no say. Only as an spectator. Just ignore me like I ignore you alright? Get out of my way.

Back to art talk.

For me, to be called ART, it has to be 100% hand made. Everything else is awesome and all, but doesn't make my soul vibrate like 100% human live performance.

I know legions of tikicentralites agree with me, even if they don't admit it here because they don't want to hurt sensibilities.

I truly highly respect digital artists skills very much and they indeed are artists. But what I am talking about here is the end product. It's not the same to have the original tiki, than what it is to have a copy.
People want to own something that was touched by the artist. The real thing.

For example, that's why prints from etchings have always been more valuable than lithographs. Because the artists actually worked into the metal/wood/linoleum and the transferred it into the paper. Instead, the lithograph was drawn by the artist into the stone and then applied to paper. This extra step on transferring the image made buyers less interested in the lithographic prints because they where not touched directly by the artist. They had less soul.

Also, the motivation. It's not the same to create a one of a kind work of art like a painting, than it is to create a digital painting for mass reproduction. The first painting is more human scale, the second is more for business.

Both are art alright! But the first one is more art than the second.

In my own humble opinion.

:)

This thread's name is "digital art discussion", right?
... Now I have to get back to my drawing board.

Now your just repeating yourself, ad nauseum.

And F.Y.I. I was a Professional Artist for some time, Likely before you were born
judging solely on the immaturity of your rants.

[ Edited by: Chuck Tatum is Tiki 2011-12-21 23:50 ]

On 2011-11-28 14:09, Chuck Tatum is Tiki wrote:
Now your just repeating yourself, ad nauseum.

And F.Y.I. I was a Professional Artist for some time, Likely before you were born
judging souly on the immaturity of your rants.

Ageism: also called age discrimination is stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals or groups because of their age.

So now your manifesting a persecution complex.

This topic is getting a bit too serious, but kinda hilarious so I gotta chime... This is a TIKI forum and there's name calling on what is more art?? Too funny... You do realize that a good majority of work that is considered Tiki is the epitome of commercial art, and therefore looked down on by the "art" world. I'll take a McGinnis painting or even a Mucha print over a good majority of the work coming from a fine art school but that's just me.. As everyone has said, it's subjective.. that's it now back to the topic.....

Like Grog, I started working in animation when it was hand drawn, hand painted, and hand shot on this stuff we used to call film so I think we share a lot of the same feelings about the digital world. (It's a common subject with us traditional animators.. ) What I miss most about "analog" art is it's limitations. You learn to work within the limitations and work on mastering a medium, perfecting a look. But you always have the human element involved that gives it a certain feel.. In the digital world you really don't have many limitations, in fact I find myself constantly fighting the "perfect" digital world by adding imperfections. All of the animation I do now is digital, and It is the polar opposite of traditional when it comes to working. In the 2d world we spent a good deal of the time trying to make a "perfect" drawing for each frame, but in 3d we spend a great deal of time trying to add imperfections.. Another downside of the digital world is what we like to affectionately call pixel- f***ing. When illustrating on the computer it's much harder to have a sense of scale, you can design a 20 ft mural or a 20 inch painting with relatively the same screen space and you can literally manipulate each pixel if you choose. It's pretty easy to forget about the piece as a whole. In animation, because it is sooo much easier to change almost anything in the digital world than in the traditional world, directors (or other chefs) tend to analyze every element on every frame and may loose sight of the scene as a whole..

However, the computer is a great tool to learn new techniques, take risks, push boundaries etc. with. It's really only limited by the user... Here are a couple illustrations I did of the same subject. They are both about 5 1/2" tall, the first is a sketch in gouache , the second is photoshop. It's not a direct comparison because the second piece was intended to be more finished, but you can see how much sharper the digital is.. A big reason for this is the same 5" piece is now blown up on a 20" monitor... I do get the "soul" argument but I believe the soul comes from the artist and even if he uses a digital brush the soul is still there. Because we use pressure sensitive "pens" that record our brush strokes, It's not too hard to envision a "printer" capable of replicating every stroke on to a canvas, will that make it more art? :D

As a student of the arts, I find digital mediums really enjoyable to play around with. Then again, I may be rather biased as I love flat, vivid colors with strong, bold line work so photoshop and illustrator really compliment that style. Granted I'm learning something new about it every day, but we're all students. I've also found that in a way drawing in photoshop is alot like sculpting with clay. You can't FORCE it, you gotta work WITH it. Just my 2 cents.

I'm seeing more and more art that's made by an AI (Artificial Intelligence). Now lazy artists can be even more lazy, and non artists can look like skilled artistic geniuses just by typing a description into a program and letting the program do all the work. Who needs talent and skill?