Jeremy White wrote this article exclusively for us. Jeremy is currently in the throngs of several projects and sub projects in digital art (2d here, 3d there), computer programming, and some hobby-level music production. Actually, all of it is hobby level, but… who cares? I consider Jeremy a real artist, read the article and you’ll know why.

A passion for Digital Painting

Hello! I’ve been doing digital painting for a surprisingly short amount of time, but thought that since I’ve got around two years under my belt, I might as well voice some thoughts on the subject. I’m only a hobbyist, but I’ve graduated to CS3 recently and have had a Wacom tablet for some time and it appears that’s the standard layout for most people.

I started art when I was very young in the sense that I enjoyed writing short stories and loved to try to draw Ren & Stimpy characters. Sadly, I let that die away when I reached high school and never really cared again for art until things came to college. I found myself so bored in calculus and other studies that I’d draw in my notebook. At some point, I got very addicted to drawing my dreams and yet I couldn’t get color because I didn’t really want to mess with paint in a dorm room. Anyone who’s been there knows that they don’t take lightly to anyone getting paint all over the furniture and I just knew that’s the kind of person I am. That’s right… my first impulse was that digital art was pretty clean. And I’m no neat-freak in any capacity. My room vacillates from messy to sterile several times a month.

So, going in to digital painting, my inspirations were people who did a lot of concept art and also landscapes. One especially prominent fellow comes to mind whom you can look at over here. An example of his 2d digital painting style is here. Some artists avoid stroke work and try to be purely realistic but I especially think the joy comes out when you can blend things fairly well. I’m trying to get there, but sometimes I veer off like in the art work of paper XI. A good tutorial of his method can be found here (I love this method too… forgive my bias here).Someone once told me “Wow… it’s like painting with pen-pricks of light”. I especially enjoy the feeling of wielding millions of little variable colored flashlights. It’s an entirely different thing when you print your work out, but I prefer to keep it all digital when possible. I guess it feels cool to throw out something you did with no real cost on how many copies you make. I know that people steal digital media left and right, too. I don’t so much care about ‘pirates’, but when I say “steal”, I speak of those who claim they did a piece of work when in fact it was based on someone else’s effort or maybe entirely just a copy. It’s a very tragic side effect.

Still, it’s amazingly fun to look back from digital painting and smile and say to a traditionalist “Hey, does your oil paint have an Undo? My media does.” But sadly, when I go back to drawing on paper, I find myself searching for Ctrl-Z all the time and looking like a goofball.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Arts, Culture, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.