Tuesday, February 23, 2010

If a person is good with painting on a digital program with the computer...?

... does that mean that they'll be good at painting with real paint?If a person is good with painting on a digital program with the computer...?
If they are willing to put up with the learning curve of the medium, then yeah.





Painting digitally is no different than painting traditionally. You still pick colors from a palette, and you still paint every stroke with a brush (i.e. pen tablet). You still have to worry about composition, color harmony, anatomy, and perspective.





You have some tools (like layers, undo, and a 16.7 million color palette) that speed up the process, but otherwise it really isn't any different. There are filters that can render certain effects, but any real artist will naturally make limited use of such things as they tend to look artificial. Even so, filters are not unlike painting traditionally using mixed media.





One can't just make the switch from digital to traditional at the flip of a switch, though. They will need to learn to mix colors, how to manage ';wet'; and ';dry'; areas, and how to work with the drying time of the medium. Still, learning those things is not unlike learning all the features of Photoshop to get the desired effects.





Bottom line, every medium has a learning curve, but no matter what the medium - digital or traditional - the art will only be as good as the artist painting with it. The medium doesn't make the art.

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