Digital art is art created by computer. These images can be viewed on screen, projected or printed out. The computer does not create art for you, however. Just like giving someone brushes and paints, does not make them an artist. The computer has an incredible range of possibilities for the creation of images, but not something you would necessarily want to put on your wall! It takes the eye of an artist to make the choices necessary to find something pleasing on the eye.
There is a good range of software available for computer art. Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw and Painter to name a few popular ones. I particularly like creating abstract designs with fractal software. The main one I use is 'Apophysis' which is a fractal flame software. It has an amazing range of possibilities and tools, with which I am in total control of all the elements, colour schemes and output resolution. I usually always use a combination of all this software to create the finished product.
Getting the 'art' from the computer involves printing in one form or another, also art can be displayed on the computer, as in the case of screen savers or backgrounds, or projected. What I like to do, however, is to render at incredibly high resolution and print in fine detail. Printing on canvas gives a very nice quality product which can enhance your living or workspace.
I am fascinated by technology and this also becomes the subject of my art. I also focus on language and communication, issues of both art and technology. My other influences are mathematical and geometric forms in nature and how light interacts with the elements.
My first foray into digital art, way back in the mists of time was on a mainframe computer storing the programs onto paper tape with punched holes. In order to draw a line or circle it was necessary to input the equations and plot the points. The output was on a graph plotter. The 'artist' was essentially a mathematician and programmer.
Digital art consolidates all my previous skills and experience. I have worked as a technical illustrator, airbrush artist, photographer, portrait artist, painter and a commercial artist using computer graphics and publishing software.
There has never been a better time than now for digital art. Recent advances in printing inks and a process called Giclée, allow the possibility of cost-effectively outputting high resolution digital files on to large canvasses, with guaranteed permanent colours, these also being acceptable to commercial galleries.
*Digital in fact means something created with digits - individual separate components (or to be more technically accurate, 'discrete (discontinuous) values', rather than a continuous range of values). On a computer screen that means pixels (hence my alias 'pixelpainter'). A 'pixel' is a small picture element, one of many that builds up the image like a mozaic. An example of digital could be like Morse code, a series of dots and dashes or bleeps, whereas an example of continuous analogue data (non-digital) could be like the hands of a clock sweeping round continuously.
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