DIGITAL ART.

Catlady

Dear Artists..
What do you think about Fine Art Digital?
I was given a WACOM Digital Tablet but I am still reluctant to use it as I actually have No idea how to use it.
I was also given Corel Painter No 9, which I have still not tried..  

Saw some awesome digital art on YOUTUBE,  jaw dropping images from some digital artists..

Just curious to know is Digital art  real art  or just a phase one has fun with.

ALL opinions will be apprecreated, xxxxxxxx

MichaelD

I have seen some great digital art.
On a personal level I am not attracted to doing it myself I thoroughly enjoy all of the tactile aspects of mixing paint, handling brushes and applying paint to work surface.
I often really feel that I am sculpting with paint, I don't think I would get that on a tablet.

  

dencal

Catlady

Digital art for me is iPad and Procreate and the big benefits are portability, convenience and speed.
I can paint and draw; on long car or train rides, in bed on sleepless nights, at an al fresco cafe.
Hugely assisted by having a great camera and music on my headphones, all on the one device.

Denis

Intothevoid

I have a Wacom Cintique 12 and Painter 11 but have not used them for absolutely ages. They are great tools and Painter is fantastic but I went off using them and prefer something a bit more tactile and real these days.
I'd give them a go even just to have a bit of non destructive experimentation and fun. Painter is like having your very own personal art supply shop but also the ability to craft your own art brushes and surface. The tools are very realistic.

Mayeoli

I personally share the previous views. But I previously started to watch a video from Andrew Tischler on an Epic Landscape painting which took him around 1 year to finalize. Apart from sketches and a study, he used Photoshop for the digital design process starting with the drawing on a tablet and following all the steps you usually do in your real painting, so the blocking-in, adding additional layers, adding highlights at the end of the design process with digital brushes providing textures to mimic the real painting process. Amazing to see the digital end result as a preparation for the real painting. Such a digital design process could be helpful if you do a commission or a larger painting project.

tassieguy

I'm not up to date with the latest tablets and digital artwork software but for landscape painters who want to create large physical  paintings I think digital technology is a marvelous tool. I couldn't do without my digital camera and computer for my landscapes.

@Mayeoli, I also watch Andrew Tischler's videos. He produces amazing paintings and states openly that he could not do what he does without modern technology. I recently watched him create a painting of wave swept rocks. He used various photos to come up with a marvelous composition and painted wet over dry to create glistening wet rocks, spray and foam. The end product, the physical painting with its beautiful texture was, IMHO,  miles better than any photo or purely digital work which, to me, never looks like real phyisical painting. You can always tell that it's computer generated art and not real painting.

I'm not criticising digital art - advertising, movies and much else relies on it these days and it produces wonderful imagery. But painting with real paint and brushes is a distinct art form, whose appeal has much to do with brushwork and 3D texture which relies on the human touch using phyisical media and that won't be repaced by computer generated art anytine soon. 

Some artists will want to go down the purely digital path. Others will stick with plein air painting and purely phyisical media. And many, like Tischler, will marry the two in the studio. It's all good. 

Catlady

Dear friends..
HUGE thank you  all you informative answwers.
I own WACOM INTUOS TABLET and COREL PAINTER NO 9

Will  try to use  my tablet and corel painter I have.
I have NO technophobia, but being a seniour artist some technlogy just escapes me, LOL..

After all even my favorite artist VERMEER was supossed to use technology in the form of Camera Obsecura..
I wonder if Digital Art will ever be  accepted as REAL Art..
Cheers to everyone here.
Keep safe keep helathy all of you. xxxxxxxx

 
..

Intothevoid

@Catlady
oooh Vermeer..have you seen the documentary called Tim's Vermeer? It is absolutely fantastic! I actually traveled to the Hague in the Netherland's last December to see the girl with the pearl earing, it is such an amazing painting 

Catlady

YES, I HAVE   SSEN THE VERMEER DOCO, AND THE ONE  WITH  DAVID HOCKNEY SECRET KNOWLEDGE, BUT NO MATTER HOW HE PAINTED OR WHAT HE USED I LOVE AND ADORE VERMEERS ART. XXXXX

GTO

@Intothevoid I watched the Tims Vermeer video and then setup the same mirror and copied a photo using the method.  It was an interesting exercise.  Tim’s approach is like taking marks DMP method to the extreme.

Intothevoid

@GTO
That is an incredible amount of patience! Watching the documentary and the hours upon hours he spent just painting the fabrics would drive me insane.

GTO

@Intothevoid well yeah, it wore poor old Tim out.  His determination and patience was amazing.  And he was, is?, not a painter. It’s a movie worth watching.

Boudicca

IMHO-Digital art is real art- there are some amazingly creative, imaginative and talented digital artists. Art is not just something that can be framed and hung in a museum. Art is expression of an idea channeled through an individual, or group of individuals, through any number of  means- painting, dancing, writing, performance, sculpture, graffiti, etc etc. 

Catlady

This artist is still strugling with her tablet and especially corel painter, why I  have no idea, LOL xxxxxxx

StephanHM

Hello there, I understand I am rather late to this topic as I just joined the forum, but it's very common for the beginning of learning digital art is very challenging and fruitless. When I first began doing digital art [working on an intuos pro] my main trouble was that I was very used to my marks being right next to the tip of my pen and it took a while to get used to not looking at my hand while drawing.

Something a lot of people do when starting out is to do their sketch first on paper, take a photo, and then work on top of that.

Also, I tried using Corel painter and found it very difficult. That was years ago so I'm sure the program has gotten more intuitive, but I personally prefer to use Paint Tool SAI, which is marketed for its user friendliness. Either way I usually find process videos very helpful!

Here's a sped up video of someone painting a landscape in paint tool SAI

Good luck!

Stephan

CBG

@Catlady

You should try ArtRage.  I am using it now... along with Mark Carder's method... at least until I have a studio set up.  I really like it .. you can try it for free.  Of course nothing simulates real paint and brushes properly yet, but I think it is the best currently out there.

hailong

getting used to the drawing tablet doesn't take much time at all. It's figuring out all the stuff that digital art software can do that takes more time, but is well worth it.

 there are a lot of different brands available and graphics tablet-screen hybrids are getting cheaper and better. I prefer XP-PEN ( https://www.xp-pen.com ) because their pens don't require a battery which makes the pen lighter. 

I've used a tiny old XP-PEN Star 05 A5 for years until I switched to a larger Deco model and now I'm using a Artist 24 Pro. 

One of the things I was most worried about in using a graphics tablet was that it would not feel as natural. However after trying it out I have to say the XP-Pen tablets feel very very similar to the real thing, especially because the XP-Pen tablets are pressure sensitive, giving thicker/thinner lines with more/less pressure(there's just no comparison to a mouse). I feel like my art options have just opened up in a way they never have before. 

I still have tons to learn on how to use software properly but I'm already finding that it's way faster/easier and just all around more convenient then traditional media. For instance when it comes to colors I'm really impatient when I use traditional media. I don't always mix interesting colors together(as that takes time) and so my bad habit of not mixing colors leads me use color straight from the tube, which is limited by the numbers of colors I have, and as I'm a cheap bastard it's not that many) but now that I have corel painter it's like I have every possible item in the art store and access to every color imaginable. 

I don't have Photoshop but I'm sure it would be the same thing as painter. I actually went back and forth on what to get(Photoshop or Painter ) and I decided to go with painter because painting is my main interest, I don't really care about making things look super realistic, I like the sketchy/painterly quality to keep the work fresh/energetic looking, having said that it's totally possible to make things look super realistic with painter too

You can even chose palettes from whatever image(take any great painting) and corel painter can import immediately that artists palette for you to use(which is unbelievably awesome, and I haven't even tried this yet!).

 Anyway as I said this all makes things way faster. And I feel like I can spend more time drawing/painting the art work and less gathering my supplies/mixing colors etc. And the more I use corel the more comfortable I become with it, to where I'm even starting to forget that I'm making art digitally but just making art.

tassieguy

That's really interesting, @hailong. I must explore drawing tablets, Corel and Paint. Hopefully it can be carried across into actual painting. Anything that can save time is important for me. 

Forgiveness

I've recently seen some mind blowing realism created digitally in Canada, using corel & paint. It's really worth looking into at this time.

jpaxson

You don't need Photoshop or Painter.  I use Clip Studio Paint.  It is fabulous for digital drawing and painting and even animation and is a fraction of the price of other options.  If you check back every now and then they have half price sales on Pro and Ex versions.  Having said that there are very good absolutely free programs like Krita that will do the job as well.

For tablets I went cheaper also.  I got an XP-Pen Artists 22E Pro and have been very happy with that.  However you go there are a ton of free resources on getting started painting on youtube.  Check out artist Aaron Blaise (former Disney animator and director).  He has online courses you can purchase at very reasonable rates, but if you just watch his weekly draw episodes you get his entire digital painting workflow for free.  He is Photoshop almost exclusively but the other programs have the same functionalities so no worries there.

Best of Luck!

Dustin_Cropsboy

CBG

I'm slowly transitioning to real media... still working on my first test study in acrylic (Golden OPEN acrylics) using DMP,

That said, I have used DMP in the digital realm... as prep for the real world...


You might recognize the reference I used for this digital piece I did:



I used a grid to for drawing since nothing quite like a proportional divider or a workable omni-orientational ruler was available. I color checked on the reference by guessing at colors and painting digital dabs directly on the reference.  I generated a full palette with "steps" prior to painting and tried not to "blend" too much with the digital brush.  Of course I added new colors to the palette and the piece as this progressed.

I'm hoping my practice in the digital realm translates... although I am finding a shocking amount of paint is required for coverage, and I've given up on mixing a whole set of steps in acrylic prior to getting paint on the canvas, things start to get sticky even after I mix only one color! ... So, still very much a novice.  Let's see how it goes.

dencal

CBG

Outstanding work. Well done.

Denis

MichaelD

Really well done @CBG

  

tassieguy

I recognize the prop, @CBG. You've made a very good job of it.  I'd love to see you do this in real paint. I find acrylics very difficult to work with because they dry so fast and because of the colour shift in the darks when they dry. I think you would find it easier to start with oils. 

KingstonFineArt

Digital art is exploding. Here are two links on digital art. The fist is for a friend who went all in back in the early 90s. Bert Monroy

https://www.bertmonroy.com/index.htm

This link is a story on CNBC about the NFY craze.

https://youtu.be/C1jJ-08kKCU

This is a digital piece I did in the early 90s using 3d render and photoshop. 

I much prefer paint. Oil, acrylic, watercolor… whatever

KingstonFineArt

Here's a straight up Photoshop painting from 2004 0r 5. Many many layers. The base drawing was done on paper with pencil. Scanned and painted. The cardboard background was merged under the paint job.

This was a popular print of mine.

CBG

Thank you @dencal @MichaelD !

@tassieguy thanks.  I agree acrylics are not easy, but right now I have no permanent space for a studio, I'm working from a photo (covered in glass... soon to be replaced with one sprayed with acrylic sealer) painting on a very small canvas and put I everything away in a desk after a session.  I spend less than an hour (getting good practice mixing colors and putting them on right away... and having to remix some of them next session...) once every 1 or 2 weeks... family and work keep me busy... and/or guilty. 

I feel a strong temptation to dive into oils and comandeer/confiscate a nice portion of our storage room for a little studio, but 1. I want to make sure I like real media and am passably good at using it prior to jumping in. 2. I am still intimidated and a little put off of on the idea of a. prestaining with harsh chemicals,  b.  dealing with and keeping track of multiple random oil or paint soaked brushes, c. dealing with or keeping track of or mixing oil for dipping, fat over lean, etc d.  worrying about adherence, drying, cracking, dust, varnishing, cleaning... 

I'm not a chemist, and I'd prefer to think about composition, light, and form rather than thinking about fats and fiddling with molecular recipes, and worrying about the lifetime of the paint...  I have precious little time or patience as it is.


Perhaps acrylics are a sort of temporary avoidance of the inevitable... if the bug bites me hard I realize I might have no choice but to move to oils... but it scares me and the thought of everything makes me cringe a little.

So oils being "easier" is perhaps a little subjective in this context...(now it certainly would be easier if I could just step into someone else's studio and start working away )

it's probably the right choice, the better choice, and the hard choice, for me...

... to be honest it is my plan, so one day I most certainly will use oils!

tassieguy

@CBG, I can relate to all of the above. But you don't have to pre-stain with harsh chemicals. I pre-stain with acrylic which means I can start painting on it in oils almost straight away. If you're worried about solvents you can avoid them by just using walnut oil as a medium as several of us here do. You can also use this as a brush dip. I hate the smell of clove oil so I don't use it but walnut oil dries slower than linseed or safflower. If you wipe your brushes then dip them in walnut oil and wrap them in plastic kitchen wrap they won't dry out. I've had to avoid solvents for health reasons but walnut oil works fine and I never have to wash brushes because they never dry out. But with acrylics the chance of them drying out is much greater and water wrecks good brushes as quickly as solvents. 

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention these things in the hope they might be helpful to you as you begin to work with real paint. 

Happy painting. 

Rob