Below is the beginning of a checklist of essentials for creating any naturalistic work of art.
Visual essentials
☑ believable imagery
☑ spatial depth
☑ smooth & rough gradation
☑ warm & cool colors
☑ rich & muted colors
☑ sharp & subtle value contrast
☑ curved & angled delineation
☑ smooth & rough delineation
☑ texture & textural contrast
Mental essentials
☑ stirs emotion
☑ creates sense of wonder
I’m starting to take digital art seriously. I’ve been reluctant to do so for two reasons. It doesn’t seem authentic and it tends to take much less work to produce than traditional art.
It doesn’t seem authentic because, as Warhol explained with his art, almost anything can now be copied. This has technically been true for imagery since the advent of the printing press and for physical objects since machines took over manufacturing.
This leads to an important question. If something can be copied, is it unique? I wondered about this for a while but finally realized that I was missing the big picture. The answer is no, but that doesn’t matter. For, while a copied image or object certainly isn’t unique, the idea informing it is. In this way, copies amplify uniqueness by projecting importance, consuming more attention than a single instance, and creating deeper memories than one.
Yet, even with that concern allayed, we have to admit that digital still tends to take much less work to produce than traditional art. Doesn’t this fact make digital art intrinsically less valuable than traditional art? I thought about this for a while, too, but I found another small-minded perspective at play. Yes, value is diminished if we assume that the value of a work of art is mostly about the work involved. However, if we see it as a combination of work, creativity, talent, and the idea informing it, then value isn’t diminished by a medium that, to look at the problem another way, basically saves time.
My goal with digital art is to push it beyond what I can achieve with traditional art. If a digital medium can produce a more impressive result or help communicate an idea better than a traditional medium, then that digital medium is better suited for that purpose. And who is to say that we can’t combine digital and traditional mediums to produce an even more superior result? Creativity shouldn’t be bound by media.