Original Digital Art - The Big Picture

With the advancement of today's computer technology, the world of art has been thrown into a tailspin. New and original digital art tools are being created with every passing day, and are serving to take the art world to loftier heights. Those who were only able to illustrate their artistic creations on paper with brushes are now capable of churning out their visionary works in a fraction of the time, and with much less physical effort and no mess. Photographers who used to painstakingly agonize over the correct lighting, position, and shutter speed of a photograph now merely have to snap a picture and glorify it on the computer. As much as digital advancements are being appreciated in the genres of graphic design, music, photography, and film production, they are slow to gain acceptance within the more "serious" art forms, such as drawing, painting, and sculpture. This is somewhat due to the notion that it is not the artist, but the computer doing the work. It is also argued that the image produced is infinitely reproducible, and therefore can never remain an original digital art piece.

Types of Digital Art Software

There are essentially two types of digital art software: the 2D (two-dimensional) and the 3D (three-dimensional). The 2D tools allow the user to draw on a flat surface, much like drawing on paper or on a canvas, yet the artist is using a mouse or graphic tablet instead of a pencil or paintbrush. The 3D tools allow you to create characters, architecture, landscape, objects, and special effects, and the computer takes a "photograph" of the image. There are countless painting, drawing, and design programs that artists can utilize in both 2D and 3D.

With the introduction of such original digital art software, art takes on a more organized style. These programs will organize a user's favourite paintbrushes, papers, and effects for easy access. Some digital art software offers what is called "cloners" in their virtual brushes, which can take the exact color from a source image of a photograph and allow the user to replicate it.

Painting programs have become very realistic, and can provide the user with more than what the ordinary paintbrush can produce. They can mimic the effect of using a pallet knife, and allow the user to select different paper textures in order to experience various effects. Another widely-used digital art tool is the graphic tablet, a remarkable gadget that allows the user to draw freehand, creating interesting and unique digital art. It can even simulate the more classical effects of an oil painting or a watercolour. The resulting work can then be printed on paper or canvas. Many state-of-the-art painting programs available now will allow you to load up your paintbrush with a color that you have mixed yourself, and lay down a brushstroke that slowly dries. Users can choose to work with almost any medium, such as chalk, pencils, pastels, oils, watercolours, felt pens, and ink.

Art on the go!

Not only do digital art tools allow you to create realistic pieces of art, but they have also affected art in a profound way by making it more portable and accessible. With the prevalence of laptops in today's society, an art studio can be carried around, thereby constantly at an artist's fingertips.

It has enhanced art by taking it to the masses. With easy user guides and specific tools that can mimic lines, effects, and colors, original digital art masterpieces can be created by pretty much anyone, even someone with no previous background or training in art. Those who have never had the proper precision or visual acuity to create stunning oil paintings or sketches, now have the chance to craft original digital art pieces.

The introduction of digital tools has made the hobby of art less pricey. With the ongoing decrease in costs for computers, software, and websites, undertaking digital art can be less expensive than purchasing oil paints, numerous brushes, different canvases, easels, and various other art supplies.

For Better or Worse

Many in the art world will argue that digital art has nothing on the real thing; that any piece of digital art can be reproduced by someone else with the same program, and that there can never be an original digital art piece. This is an erroneous statement, as some digital artists have taken to deleting the image file of the masterpiece when it is completed, thereby rendering the piece an original. While a painting may fade, chip, or crack over time, works produced with digital printing equipment have remarkable longevity. When printed with modern digital art technology, colors can last from 60 to 100 years.

Art Historian, Donovan Gauvreau lectures about art therapy with a focus on creativity development. He believes we can learn from the great masters in art to communicate ideas and feelings through painting. He provides content to Aaron Art Prints to educate and inspire people to take a glimpse into an artist's life to better understand the meaning behind their work.

The Art of Digital Photo Retouching

The Limits of Photo Cameras

We live in an age of amazing technological advancements in the visual technology fields. Photo camera models renew themselves each year with the promise of more mega-pixels and new features. And yet, if we think about it for a moment, the photo that comes out of each of our digital camera models most times has strengths and weaknesses that persist through all the successive models that go through our hands.

Digital Cameras and in general all photographic cameras are, despite all of the marketing buzz, still very limited machines. For example, they register our world with sensors that can only capture a fraction of the tonal range that our eyes can perceive.

Imagine yourself on a sunny day in front of a beautiful landscape.

Below you, around your feet, you can see the rich lush green vegetation; above you, the bright blue skies. As we contemplate this scene, our eyes are able to perceive all its richness, the details in both the shadows and the bright clouds above. The dynamic range that our eyes can process, which goes from the darkest to the brightest areas, is enough to contain most of the rich detail in that scene.

Now take your photo camera and snap a shot from your position including both the vegetation and the sky. The result is very telling. Depending on the parameters that either the camera or you choose, some detail of the scene will be gone from the result. Either parts of the vegetation will blend to black and lose all detail or parts of the sky will blend to white and lose all detail.

In summary, the retina of the camera, its digital sensor, which captures the light of the scene, is not capable of dealing with a tonal range as large as our eyes can. It can only capture the full detail in a small range that can be positioned at different levels of brightness by the camera itself or us. Because of that, in a scene like the one described above that has a very large contrast, it ends up capturing the detail only at the highlights and mid-tones, or mainly at the mid-tones, or mainly at the shadows and mid-tones. It simply cannot capture simultaneously the full detail of the scene from the darkest to the brightest areas.

This is of course a simplification of an scenario that we could describe in much more detail. But the conclusion is still the same. When we look at the final photo, we realize that what we remember seeing with our eyes is not what the photo shows. That richness of detail everywhere is gone. And this is just one of the limitations that all Photo cameras share. We could go on to describe many others related to color precision and other areas where cameras simply cannot cope with the depth and richness of the world around us.

Photo Retouching comes to the rescue

Here is where photo retouching enters the scene. So what really is photo retouching and what is it useful for? We can approach this question from two angles and both are related to each other:

Bringing the Photo closer to what we remember

1) On the one hand, photo retouching is the art of taking that initial photo and working on it by various means to bring it closer to what our eyes saw when we were in front of that beautiful scene.

Photo retouching applied to the scenario described above is, for example, the art of manipulating the image we captured and making more visible some of the details that almost disappeared due to the limitations of our photo camera. It enables us as well to enhance the color of the picture and bring it closer to what our eyes enjoyed. In short, retouching allows us to take the photo and compensate for the limitations of our camera. It gives us the possibility to try and bring the final result as close as possible to what we remember.

Two key points here:

a) First, retouching is not synonymous with Photoshop. Photoshop is the most popular of the tools used in our digital age to retouch photographs. But retouching can be done in numerous ways, either with the many software products available on the market or by processing the digital outputs in other ways (such as printing and scanning the photo successive times including physical interventions in the middle to alter different properties of the image).

b) The second point is that when we talk about - what we remember from the scene - we have to take into account the psychological implications of that statement. It has been shown that often when we remember a beautiful nature landscape, we remember it greener and more saturated in color than it really was.

Therefore, when we retouch that photo, should we manipulate the output to approach what we remember from the scene, or what the scene truly looks like when we stand in front of it?

But no one can possibly say what the scene truly looks like. For each of us, the experience of looking at something will be completely different. Furthermore, what we remember from our visual connection with the scene will also be different for each of us as vision is truly relative. (let's remember the example of the person who is enclosed in a room painted completely red and with nothing else inside to compare that color to. The person will be unable to see that red color until we introduce something with which he can compare it).

So, if we are retouching a picture for ourselves, we will attempt to bring that image closer to what we remember based on our own personal experience. If we are retouching it for somebody else, we may either bring that scene closer to what generally is accepted as attractive for such a scenario or we may ask the client whose photo we are retouching the details of his/her perception of that scene and then manipulate the result towards that direction.

Moving Beyond what we see

2) On the other hand, retouching allows us to go beyond the first point and enhance reality in infinite directions. As we mentioned previously, vision is very relative. We all remember the same scene in different ways. That lush green vegetation will be remembered by some of us as more saturated in color than by others, some will remember it more yellow and others greener. Some will remember the vegetation to be brighter and others darker; some will even remember it larger and others smaller. This is all a consequence both of the biology of our eyes and of the continuous filtering that our brain performs on our perception of the world around us.

Depending on the importance and resonance that our different memories have on us, the brain will remember different scenarios in different ways. Therefore we can summarize by saying that once we leave a scene, its representation in our minds starts to get distorted. What we remember is a mixture of the filtering and processing performed by our brain plus how our mind wants to remember that input. All in all, most times what we remember has little to do with the actual physical input we had in front of us.

This very same human trait that at first may sound a bit disturbing is also what powers our imagination and our capacity to invent, to create, to expand beyond what we see. It allows us to blend, interconnect, associate and produce ideas and images that we have never seen in real life.

And here is where retouching again becomes an extremely powerful tool. Not only can we start from that initial photo we snapped with our camera and take control of the distortion that happens naturally in our minds, but this time we can modify the image consciously in whatever directions our imagination suggests.

We can make a blue shirt red. We can expand that forest of trees and make it five times larger. We can put an ocean around our house or extract a figure from its background and make it fly through the skies. The possibilities are endless. As such, from this second perspective, retouching becomes a wonderful way of visually imagining, exploring, creating and expanding ideas.

The art of retouching, described from these two angles, is an art-form that requires conscious thought and decision-making strategies. We have to decide what parts of the picture we will work on and what style of retouching we will perform. Will it be retouching that will go unnoticed and simply enhance the picture without calling attention to itself? Or will it be retouching that aims to transform the image into something completely out of our imagination and therefore will aim to look surprising and new in an elegant way?

A professional photo retoucher works with the image like a craftsman. He must work carefully with his electronic brush, repairing, correcting, blending and transforming the image in subtle ways that slowly change it just as a sunset or a sunrise slowly transition into a new reality without sudden changes that could call attention to themselves. As such, the work of a professional photo retoucher is similar to the work of a painter, a sculptor or an illustrator.

Precision work full of creativity and focus that aims to do what our photo cameras could not do; Enhance and transform the photo closer to what our eyes enjoyed and our minds remember.

Retouching can cover an infinite array of treatments including basic color correction, high end beauty retouching, skin retouching, make-up enhancement, glamour retouching, lighting enhancement, photo montages, portrait retouching, eyes retouching, photo illustration, photo restoration and touch up, magazine photo retouching, photo cartooning, background extractions, damaged photos restoration, wedding photography retouching, panoramic photography, photo paintings, other special effects and so much more.

Some online services offer minimal automated basic retouching services like automatic color and contrast enhancements. These perform generic automated corrections to an image and fail to produce optimum results for the same reason that all automated processes in life fail to adapt to the unique individual circumstances of a subject, in our case an image.

Every picture is a different world. Automated processes can improve the contrast and color of an image sometimes, but other times they can degrade the image instead of improving it, taking the image in the opposite direction needed by blindly following theoretical rules and mechanical algorithms.

And what is even more important, automated processes cannot think and cannot create a strategy of what they want to achieve. They cannot contemplate an image and create a plan to bring it closer to what our human eyes would enjoy or to the dreams that our souls envision.

That is why the best retouching can only be done by humans, by artists, by creatives, by truly, magicians that with their electronic wands work for hours and days on the pictures and create results that sometimes reflect our memories and other times transform our dreams into realities, as real for our eyes as what we remembered but even better, taken to the edges and peaks of human creativity and beauty.

Javier Gonzalez is creative director of http://www.klinklin.com

KlinKlin's mission is to bring the magic of Professional Photo Retouching to the photos of our lives - the everyday photos that we take with our cameras, and to do so in a fast and affordable way.

With KlinKlin, you can be on the cover of a magazine or on a movie poster, you can appear in a photo illustration or a cartoon, be virtually transported to new backgrounds and places and receive make-up and skin treatments of the highest quality; The possibilities are endless with the different services we offer.

We offer Beauty Photo Retouching, photo repair, picture editing and photo enhancement services that transform your photos into shining keepsake to be shared with your loved ones, friends and family.

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An Introduction To Digital Painting

Digital painting is an activity which can result in incredibly realistic and detailed artwork. If you would like to learn the basics, it is important to start by familiarizing yourself with an understanding of what is actually involved. Today, there is various software than can be used by professional designers, illustrators, and artists. The tools that are available allow for an artist to have incredible freedom of expression.

Unlike traditional art forms, with this medium there is no need to be concerned about running out of supplies or making a mess. It is a format which is very forgiving when making mistakes, no other medium would allow you to erase strokes over and over without damaging the canvas. You can produce print quality illustrations with efficiency.

In simple terms, digital painting involves creating art directly on your computer. Though there have been applications around for a considerable time that allow for such activity, over the last few years the scope and functionality of the software has improved massively. These days, you do not need a degree in computer illustration to create high quality images.

The foundation of this modern approach lies in traditional art skills. The process is straightforward, but it does require a broad understanding of the use of specific techniques, tools, and filters. Once the basics are mastered, there is almost no limit to the number of attractive images that can be created. Even with a simple paintbrush tool and digital eraser, interesting art can be made.

The software available for this activity is designed to mimic the use of traditional physical media through various paint effects and brushes. There are tools that are styled to represent the use of acrylic, oil, pastels, pen, air-brushing, and charcoal. Most of the applications also allow users to create their own brushes and styles using a combination of shape and texture.

There are many different styles of digital painting. This includes such forms as watercolor, realism, and impressionism. There are both detractors and advocates of this medium. While it allows an artist to work in an organized and mess free environment, some say that more control exists when holding an actual brush in the hand.

Digital painting techniques are often used in production art. People versed in this field can be found employed in the film, television, and video game industries. It is suggested that this is a medium which will become more accessible in the future with the introduction of more simplified software and tablet PCs.

With one simple click you can transform pictures into works of art with a easy-to-use digital painting software, there are a lot of things that you can do with this application. For more info click here

Digital Art: Explore Illustration

Digital illustration is big business these days. A quick look at roadside billboards, club flyers or magazine covers should be enough to convince anyone that the art of the digital designer has never been in higher demand, and its popularity just keeps on growing.

But defining exactly what digital illustration is proves tricky. We all know what the words mean, yet the myriad of ways in which illustration can be applied makes it one of the most versatile of the creative arts and as such, it's pretty difficult to pin down.

With a strong creative vision and the right software, concepts can be articulated in limitless ways; each style opening new doors for expression. The one crucial skill that ties it all together is the need for some innate artistic ability. You don't need to be a virtuoso with a pencil to be good at computer art, but there's no doubt that most professional illustrators are proficient with traditional art techniques.

The basics of image structure are the same across mediums, after all, and with software increasingly able to mimic traditional drawing methods, the transition to digital has become almost seamless. Let's take a closer look at the main branches of digital illustration and discover a little more about how the experts put them together.

Vector art

It's no great accident that vector illustration is currently one of the trendiest and easily recognisable of the digital art disciplines. The signature flat colours and clean lines are easy to spot and quick to grab attention, which of course makes the style hugely popular with advertisers looking to catch the eye of potential consumers. In addition, their reduced colour palettes and scalable technology means they are perfect when it comes to artwork for the Web.

Created with precision by manipulating Bezier paths, the mechanics of vectors are based on mathematic principles that make them infinitely scalable without suffering degradation. This trait is extremely attractive to illustrators because it means images can be shrunk to a stamp or stretched to a billboard, without having to be redone. Paths are also easy to edit at a later stage, making vector images quick to tweak and rearrange if need be.

Vector shapes are often produced with photographs or hand drawn scans as templates, digitally tracing as much of the outline and detail as needed. Programs such as Flash can even create vectors automatically by tracing over photographic or pre sketched material, allowing picture elements to be created quickly and with little effort. However, the real artistry comes when choosing which elements to take to the digital image, and knowing how to colour and arrange the final illustration.

Keeping up to date is crucial and, since digital artists typically spend hours in front of a screen involved in their masterpieces, it's all too easy to become isolated from what's going on around you. Styles ace constantly changing and trends can come and go at great speed, so keeping your finger on the industry pulse is vital. Not only does it make good commercial sense, but it can also act as a rich muse from which to draw ideas

Mixing media

While vector art focuses on clean shapes, simple forms and bold chunks of colour, other digital illustration techniques take things in the opposite direction. Since the arrival of Photoshop in 1990, artists have been able to digitally manipulate photographic material and combine it with other visual ingredients, and when layers arrived with Photoshop 3.0 five years later, the stage was set for a new form of digital image. In 1995, digital photo illustration was born.

Based on the traditional method of using scissors and glue to cut and paste photos and artwork together in new arrangements, it's a technique that has always been popular with children but has now become the favoured strategy of many an adult illustrator. This is primarily due to Photoshop's specialised, yet accessible and intuitive, toolset, but also reflects the success the strategy can have when attempting to convey a complicated collection of ideas.

Sketching toons

While everyone knows that Photoshop is the king of detailed mixed media illustration, less well known is the fact that it's also astonishingly good at producing line and comic style artwork. Deftly sidestepping the need to use intricate filters and effects, the hand drawn, hand coloured look is gaining favour with artists and art directors alike.

Because of the time saving tools that Photoshop offers, professional comic book artists are beginning to use the software to colour their hand drawn sketches and are taking digital art into previously unexplored areas. Using a mixture of both hand drawn and digital painting, new styles are surfacing that are making a massive impact on the established illustration industry.

Realer than real?

But for many artists, the Holy Grail of computer art is realism. Recent advances in graphics technology have enabled software developers to accurately simulate

real world drawing and painting tools by modelling how inks, chalks, oils and paints behave when they are applied to different surfaces. Using random particles to create natural looking strokes on simulated materials, you can now produce painted images that are all but indistinguishable from their hand made equivalents.

Since you can also grab a graphics tablet and paint directly onto your digital canvas, digital painting is less a description of an illustration style and more a literal possibility. As well as further mimicking the traditional within the digital arena, it's also easy to pick up and get started. To this end, having some experience with real world painting is a definite advantage.

Because the technology behind natural media is so intricate, there are only a handful of programs that can actually achieve believable results. The most specialised is Corel Painter, which takes the possibilities to extremes by providing an array of simulated traditional drawing and painting tools. It even goes so far as to model the way that watercolour Paints behave when wet, with drips, runs and splashes. However, with some crafty brush creation and expert manipulation of layers, equally exciting effects can be replicated in your humble copy of Photoshop.

Pixel power

But although illustration software is advancing, it would be a mistake to think that the industry is focussing purely on pushing the undiscovered boundaries of digital imaging. In among the simulated paintings, clean vectors and intricate photo collages, a resurgence of old school pixel techniques is proudly celebrating the humble beginnings of computer art.

Pixel illustration is arguably where the whole digital illustration shebang began, back in the days when computer screens could only display a small number of colours at a low resolution. But, like so many limitations, this situation forced creativity and produced a unique style that's now being snapped up in an industry that's constantly on the lookout for something different.

Because low resolutions mean large pixel sizes, pixel art uses geometric rules that ensure perspectives are correctly maintained . A by product of this is the familiar isometric view that's so common in this style of illustration, yet it does lend itself surprisingly well to conceptual art.

Pixel art continues to gain momentum, with increasing numbers of advertising and editorial commissioners looking to capitalise on its retro style designs. The bold use of colour and scrutinising detail also make it ideal for clients wishing to attract close attention and its popularity shows no signs of slowing.

Make it yours

With so many creative styles to work with, there are many entry points into the world of digital illustration. If you already own an imaging package, then you've got all the tools you need to get started. The disciplines we've delved into cover the majority of styles that are suited to computer art, but who knows what some hot new illustrator will come up with tomorrow. The range of software available combined with the sheer diversity of human experience, means that there is unlimited opportunity for individual expression.

So if you think you could be the next big thing then don't delay because, whatever your style, now is your chance. The hipness of digital illustration is just beginning to break into the consciousness of the mainstream and there's never been a better time to explore your creative potential.

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What is Digital Art?

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.

http://www.pixelpainter.co.uk