#I’m trying out a new art program that mimics traditional oil painting and I need practice so I’m especially looking for requests

[lesbianfakir]

If anyone has art requests for any of the anime I post about on here (tutu, utena, fma, madoka, etc), ESPECIALLY requests for something more painterly please let me know!! I can’t promise I’ll do them for sure, mental illness is absolutely sucking the creativity out of me rn, but I’d love to make something that would make someone happy, you know? Please don’t be shy!!

[tumblunni]

I like to try and explain digital art as...

This is a canvas.

This is paint.

This is a canvas and paint.

Digital art isn’t any less because it’s ‘just computers’, it isn’t some sort of magic program that makes the art for you automatically. It’s just a virtual space that mimics real life paint. Plus pencils and watercolours and all sorts of different art effects all in one place, including ones unique to the medium such as pixels or 3d modelling. All with more precise control over editing the colours and features of the brush you use. That’s the main appeal! That and also having an undo button, and being able to more easily send your art everywhere over the internet, yknow?

So, basically, your ‘art program’ cannot make anything for itself, it’s just a paintbrush. Digital artists put just as much effort into taking this spread of slightly more ethereal paintbrushes and turning them into art. So give them the respect they deserve!

Also, there’s a lot of neat stuff you can only do with digital art that might look kinda like ‘the computer just does it’ if you don’t understand all the steps the person took to actually draw the whole thing. For example, this entirely random cool photoshop edit I found on google, which has a wonderful tutorial here!

This image helps show the principle at work!

Think of photograph editing as.. well, someone literally cuts up some photographs and makes a collage. People did this even before computers, it’s the infamous source of many cryptid, alien and fairy “sightings!” But, again, it’s made easier in a virtual space and has many additional tools that couldn’t work with a physical piece of paper.

For example in this particular photo trick we have three pictures: this pretty island without a cliff underneath, a cliff from somewhere else, and a big ooky spooky halloween skull! The artist cuts out each photo, and the interface element called Layers symbolizes how you’d put those photo pieces on top of each other on your desk. Something on Layer 1 (or whatever you want to rename it) would be flat on the table, then Layer 2 is on top of it, and so forth. But the interesting thing that makes them different from real life collage is that there’s Layer Modes! Imagine if you could just flip a button and turn a normal piece of paper into tracing paper! O_O So that’s what the Multiply mode does in this particular example, and there’s many other modes that do other effects, like making a picture darker or lighter or doing a photo negative. Loads of fun! But here this person is using their semi-transparent tracing paper cutout of a cliff to make the skull look a little bit more like it’s made of rock. After this they’d manually paint in any extra details to make it look more realistic, and then use other elements of photo collage skill to add water effects and dramatic text, or whatever might pull the whole piece together. And then you have the very cool movie poster image of a beautiful island hiding an ominous secret!

Though I can understand why people might see this as ‘cheating’, since it saves a lot of time and has better results than like.. hand painting over your collage using a projector displaying the second image, cos you simply can’t do semi transparent layers in real life. But it’s still not like this particular type of virtual creation took no effort, and digital art in general isn’t easier just because this one small thing is easier. Plus, honestly, this level of photomanipulation is mostly used for silly comedy and making movie posters look better. Or drawing your friend riding a dragon as a fun christmas gift! Like any art form, the better results require more skill. Really complicated results require things like HUNDREDS of layers of pictures all smashed together, extreme painting skills and deep understanding of light and perspective to make them look like they all really happened at the same time. I think that photomanips in particular only get derided as ‘fake art’ because the basic result by a total beginning looks comparatively higher quality than beginner drawing. But I’m sure you all remember how you thought your drawings were high art as a kid, and then grew up to see all the flaws and think “Man, how did I ever miss that?” You kinda need at least a surface level knowledge of art in order to understand quality when you see it. Digital art is just a new medium to these people, so they don’t have that reference material established in their head so that they can fully appreciate the difference in effort between two pieces.

But it’s not impossible, and I’m sure someday people of both sides of the art world will be able to appreciate each other without this infighting! Besides, digital art benefits well from a background knowledge of drawing anatomy, line weight, shading, and all sorts of other things. It’s just sketching in a different dimension! And traditional art can also benefit from being scanned and transferred, and you can even restore the original versions of tarnished old paintings, without risk of damaging them! Though, I mean, it’s more like playing detective and guessing at possible interpretations? it’s still absolutely worth the effort to concoct newer and better oil residue removal solutions so that we can uncover the real paintings someday. (LOL I’M GOING OFFTOPIC A LITTLE) Plus there’s always loads of fun and really unique results when you combine digital and traditional methods! Personally i’m a huge fan of the aesthetic of real, scanned pencil lines with digital colouring, and I’m aiming to learn this and someday achieve success!

So yeah, that’s my kinda incoherant rambling digital art post, I guess XD thanks for reading, and may you have much luck in your art!