Digital painting

Digital painting is the creation of electronic images that is carried out not by rendering computer models, but by using a human imitation of traditional tools of the artist.

Content

General Information

Creating a picture / picture from the beginning to the end on the computer is a relatively new direction in the visual arts. It makes no sense to establish the exact date of the creation of the first computer drawing (you can get bogged down in determining what is artistic enough and serious enough for the drawing itself); However, the approximate date of the wide appearance of impressive and colorful works performed on PCs was 1995-1996 (as of this date, SVGA monitors and video cards capable of displaying 16.7 million colors appear and are widely distributed. Computer in digital painting is the same tool as a brush with an easel. In order to draw well on a computer, it is also necessary to know and be able to apply all the knowledge and experience gained by generations of artists (the laws of perspective, color theory, glare, reflexes, etc.).

The use of digital technologies in photography has also generated hybrid technologies (for example, photoimpressionism ).

Hybrid technologies are also used in the visual arts (in addition to cosmetic correction or improvement of the manual original). Two main areas: first, a manual image is made that is not brought to completion (mainly limited to a sketch), and computer work is completed; modification of the completed manual image using a computer editor. In the latter case, the range of processing depth is very wide: from changing only the mood (through the color gamut) through modifying the image to completely changing the original image to unrecognizability.

The progress of digital painting

At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, digital painting is rapidly developing and occupies strong positions in the design of books / posters, dominates the computer games industry and modern cinema, and is popular in amateur art. The reasons for the rapid displacement of previous funds from these areas:

Accessibility

In order to create digital works of any level, you need to purchase / have a personal computer of sufficient power, a graphics tablet and several programs for computer painting. All this will cost about $ 1500 in the initial version (professionals buy more expensive computers, monitors and tablets, which increase usability).

Greater speed of work

Specialized programs for CG artists (for example, Painter ) contain a large number of tools that speed up work. Choosing the right color is a matter of seconds (as opposed to traditional painting, where you need to mix paints to get the right color — it takes experience and time), choosing the right brush / tool is also an almost instantaneous operation. The ability to cancel your actions, as well as the ability to persist at any point in your work and return to it later and even a large list of opportunities and advantages - all this makes the work of a professional artist several times faster with the same quality. In addition, computer work is immediately ready for use in digital technologies of cinema, games, layout - the work done on the material with paints must be transferred to a digital form.

Unique toolkit

In contrast to traditional painting, digital features progressive and high-tech features and super-developed artistic capabilities, such as: working with layers or applying textures from photographs to the areas of the picture you need; generation of noise of a given type; various brush effects; HDR pictures; various filters, transformations and corrections; a huge number of shades of colors and textures; various line structures.

Perspectives

Traditional art almost reached its limit on the perfection of technology and tools in the XVIII century. Since then, almost nothing new has been added - the artist still has paints, pigment, oil (or their mixture), canvas and brushes. Modern computer painting is already far from the best canvases of geniuses of the past in terms of quality and scale of work - and it has much to develop further. The resolution of displays is growing, the quality of color rendering is increasing, the power of computers is increasing, programs for digital painting are changing and improving, there is a fundamental possibility of creating new ways and devices for working with color / color output (projectors or holography).

Access to training and work

If the user knows how to work on a computer and has drawing skills or has an artistic education, he will not have much difficulty in understanding the interface of computer painting programs - he is the same as most Windows programs and has a completely logical digital artist's toolbox. On the Internet, video tutorials on work in one program or another are available, containing a record of all the stages of the artist’s work on a digital picture.

The disadvantages of digital painting

Difficulty of mastering

At the moment, there are very few schools or more serious educational institutions teaching in this specialty — the most energetic and curious people, and especially children who know how to self-study and find information on their own, are becoming digital artists; designers and printers (having experience working with graphics on a PC); most of the famous digital artists graduated from schools of traditional painting and only then independently switched to cg-art. Also, a modern digital artist is unthinkable without the Internet (communication with colleagues, employers, the search for new programs or ways of drawing, etc.) - and again, not everyone has it. There are practically no books on creating drawings on a computer, but the situation is gradually improving.

As of 2007, the situation is in a fairly good position - at the moment there are quite a lot of different educational resources for training future teachers of fine arts to work with digital devices. The methods of working on a computer with a graphics tablet and various programs that allow to engage in media analysis are mastered intensively. In the near future, such courses will be launched in the main pedagogical universities of the country, which in turn will subsequently have a positive effect on schools and other universities when they receive new teachers who have good experience working with a media drawing and digital painting.

The current limit of computer capabilities.

Modern monitors still do not work in resolutions that are close to the resolution of our eyes. That is, the monitor is not able to display as many details and details as can be observed live in the same size section of the canvas of classical painting. You can print your picture on the printer - but this gives rise to the third problem of cg-art'a:

Problem with outputting computer image to tangible medium

Most of the monitors work in the RGB color model with the sRGB color space, the color borders of which do not coincide with those of a typical CMYK printer with its own color gamut limits. As a result, some of the colors visible on the monitor are not printed on paper, and at the same time, the full potential of the printer in its coverage is not used. To solve this problem, professional monitors are used with an ARGB (Adobe RGB) color space, specially designed to accommodate almost all the colors available for the printer, and color profiles are used to best match the images on the monitor and print media. However, a 100% match cannot be achieved, because even the worst sRGB space is wider in some areas of color than many CMYK spaces. Another problem - monitors that can show all the colors of a picture (and having a brightness, contrast, color setting), as a rule, have too little resolution, which does not allow to show all the details of the picture (do not show it in full size without interpolation - more than 1-2 megapixels the monitor cannot display simultaneously, special and quite expensive LCD monitors can show about 8 megapixels).

Copyright issue

The one who has the original (source) picture file is the owner of the picture. But, like any digital information, the file can be copied and replicated in unlimited quantities without any appreciable costs. The simplest example of protecting your image is putting a smaller copy on the Internet (usually professional artists paint in high resolution - 6000 × 10,000 pixels or even more - it’s convenient to draw details, and a small version on the Internet is 1600 × 1200 or less; or even a fragment). In this case, whoever has a large version of the picture, he is its author and owner. The copyright in digital art is easy to change and only well-known artists can sense the real help from its presence.