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I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family frien

by Daub 1y ago

I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family friend on the subject of art. They asked my if I had considered trying out this new technology, saying with stars in her eyes that ‘it can draw lines to a degree of accuracy of thousands of an inch’. I was at the time rightfully unconvinced. This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist. In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had. I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.

crq-yml 1y ago
There's a related phenomenon in that we now have an "iPad kid" generation that gets sucked into these extremely precise digital tools without a lot of context, following the beginner's trope of overvaluing rendering and draftmanship to the end of making pieces that all take hundreds of hours and do very little to utilize the machine's ability to automate or dissect information. I remember coming across a livestream of someone whose line-making process was to zoom in and scrub over a tiny area repeatedly for several minutes to create the effect of a single ink brush stroke. The effect was pleasant and had a very intentionally designed quality to it, but I came back a few hours later and he had made hardly any progress. The goal he had in mind was really better suited for vector tools, but the machine wasn't stopping him in the way that paper would give out under intensive scrubbing. I'm quite sure, extrapolating that anecdote, that there's someone out there trying to intentionally design each pixel in a 4k image. IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.
- Daub 1y ago
  > IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure. Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool. I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors. Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.

by Daub 1y ago

crq-yml 1y ago

There's a related phenomenon in that we now have an "iPad kid" generation that gets sucked into these extremely precise digital tools without a lot of context, following the beginner's trope of overvaluing rendering and draftmanship to the end of making pieces that all take hundreds of hours and do very little to utilize the machine's ability to automate or dissect information. I remember coming across a livestream of someone whose line-making process was to zoom in and scrub over a tiny area repeatedly for several minutes to create the effect of a single ink brush stroke. The effect was pleasant and had a very intentionally designed quality to it, but I came back a few hours later and he had made hardly any progress. The goal he had in mind was really better suited for vector tools, but the machine wasn't stopping him in the way that paper would give out under intensive scrubbing. I'm quite sure, extrapolating that anecdote, that there's someone out there trying to intentionally design each pixel in a 4k image. IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.

Daub 1y ago
> IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure. Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool. I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors. Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.