February 2007 — News
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The Artistry of Painter X
2/6/2007—In media labs and classrooms around the country, the visual arts are increasingly going digital. Video editing, motion graphics, design, animation, photography: All have followed the trend in the professional world toward desktop- and workstation-based production. And the same is true to a certain extent with drawing and painting, although there seems to be more of a lag in adoption of digital technologies in those areas.
And the reason for this lag is, to some degree, that while visual arts like video editing and motion graphics practically mandate a digital approach these days, drawing and painting have gotten along just fine without any digital technologies for thousands of years. And, in many cases, "natural media" tools (if you can refer to synthesized chemicals as being any more natural than digital media) have been up until recently far superior to any of the digital tools available.
But with the availability of two significant digital painting tools on the market--Corel Painter and Synthetik Studio Artist--artists around the world have begun coming on board. Witness, for example, the digital abstract expressionism of Jean Detheux at http://www.vudici.net/ or the sublime animation of Gitanjali Rao (http://printedrainbow.com/). And consider, also, that painting programs like Painter and Studio Artist are being used for rotoscoping in commercial movie releases (viz. Richard Linklater's Waking Life and his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly), and that a number of techniques traditionally involving natural media (such as matte painting for films) have moved over to digital, and you begin to get a sense of the future: Digital is and will be, at the very least, a complement to traditional media in the creation of still and moving artwork.
And in education, the usefulness of digital painting programs goes beyond studio applications. These programs can also enhance art theory and art history lessons with interactive displays of techniques and concepts. There's even an online education series that explores art theory and history for younger learners that ties in with one such program, Corel Painter: geeART16.
But, as I say, up until about six or seven years ago, there weren't really any great drawing and painting programs on the market. The major illustration and image editing programs have always offered limited and rudimentary tools. And most of the dedicated drawing and painting programs on the market weren't much better. Certainly very little to make the dedicated fine artist take notice.
Painter, of course, is the most well known of the dedicated digital drawing and painting tools.
