[roundeye]

...from digital back to traditional?

something ive been thinking about for a while now. ive trained myself (what little i know about painting) on the computer, and i now have some supplies that were bought for me (havent painted in 7-8 yrs) and im just curious as to the opinion of those that have gone from one to the other.

quote:

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"Could you reproduce your fabulous works without your computer, B?"

Right now? No. I don't know paint well enough. Give me a year, and then sure. All the same theory carries over, its just a different working methodology.

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if anyone has trained extensively on the computer and switched back, id love to hear what you were able to retain, the differences etc...

[Ian Jones]

I'm not that great and inexperienced at painting, but I can say for sure that learning 'stuff' here at the forum, basic things about form, drawing, line, tone, light & shadow, rendering, etc... helped me paint in Gouache like I never could before. Because I now know so much more about painting, I can transfer my knowledge to almost any area... its just the tools and process that can be different. I believe its all possible.

[eyewoo]

I'm in agreement with Ian. If the basic observational and motor control skills are there, an artist can work in just about any medium... with the initial skills intact, the barriers to success have more to do with patience, understanding a medium's inherent chatacteristics and love or hate of the medium.

[ April 04, 2002: Message edited by: eyewoo ]

[Duckman2]

For me working in traditional mediums is much easier. The surface of a tablet is a little too slippery for my taste and when I use color I like to mix them and disect what goes into the color that I see. But I'm sure that if I couldn't paint in real life I wouldn't be able to paint in photoshop.

[balistic]

The main difference between real paint and digital, at least from my experience, is the way colors mix. Not only is paint subtractive rather than additive, but you're working with a different set of primaries (red, blue, and yellow, instead of red, green, and blue).

Another difference I notice is that traditionally trained artists like to use very specific colors in their palette . . . payne's gray, raw umber, cad red light, et cetera . . . but because of my digital experience, I was always more comfortable with a basic primary palette . . . give me a nice, saturated blue, a somewhat opaque yellow, a clean red, and some white, and I'll mix what I need from there.

I never saw the point of buying a jar of brown paint, when its something that can be easily mixed on the palette.

So I think that color is definitely the main difference between digital and traditional, once you factor out things like undo.

[ryan tucker]

I'll reply coming from the opposite direction. I've done alot of traditionaly artwork from sculpting, pottery, painting, drawing, etc. and I'm just now getting into computer art.

The thing I of course like best about computer art is the undo button. Second to that, adding color doesn't "muddy up" the work like real paint would, which allows for a lot of reworking. But after that it's pretty much the same concepts. What's hard for me is that I try to use tools in computer art just like in paint, which doesn't work. Brush strokes and all that become a bit more complicated.

What I like more about painting is that I have a palpable surface. I can use everything from a nail to scratch the paint, or throw on some cooking oil to give it a different look, while in computer art you have to figure out how to give it that look and it's a bit more complicated.

I posted my first work on the finished/gallery forum, and I think I did better becuase of my understanding of the concepts and ideas of art. So I think a lot transferred just becuase of the way I think. The hard part is learning how to use the tools at your disposal to portray that image in your mind.