Disadvantages of digital painting. How digital painting developed

Digital painting- the creation of electronic images, carried out not by rendering computer models, but through the use of computer simulations by humans traditional instruments artist.

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  Creating a drawing/painting from start to finish on a computer is a relatively new direction in fine arts. There is no point in establishing the exact date of the creation of the first computer drawing (you can get bogged down in determining what is artistic and serious enough for a drawing as such); however, the approximate date for the widespread appearance of impressive and colorful works performed on the PC is 1995-1996 (this date marks the emergence and widespread adoption of relatively affordable SVGA monitors and video cards capable of displaying 16.7 million colors). In digital painting, a computer is the same tool as a brush and easel. In order to draw well on a computer, you also need to know and be able to apply all the knowledge and experience accumulated by generations of artists (laws of perspective, color theory, glare, reflexes, etc.).

  Hybrid technologies are also used in the fine arts (in addition to cosmetic corrections or improvements to the manual original). Two main directions: first, a hand-made image is made, which is not completed (mostly limited to drawing), and the work is completed on the computer; modification of a completed hand-drawn image using a computer editor. In the latter case, the range of depth of processing is very wide: from changing only the mood (through the color scheme) through modifying the image to completely changing the original image - beyond recognition.

  Progress of digital painting

  At the end of XX - beginning of XXI centuries digital painting is rapidly developing and occupies a strong position in the design of books/posters, prevails in the computer games industry and modern cinema, is popular in amateur creativity. The reasons for the rapid displacement of previous funds from these areas:

  Availability

  In order to create digital works any level, you must purchase/have Personal Computer sufficient power, a graphics tablet and several programs for computer painting. All this will cost ~$1,500 in the initial version (professionals buy more expensive computers, monitors and tablets that increase the convenience of work).

  High speed

  Specialized programs for CG artists (for example Painter) contain a large number of tools that speed up work. Choosing the right color is a matter of seconds (unlike traditional painting, where you have to mix paints to get the right color - requires experience and time), choosing the right brush/tool ​​is also an almost instantaneous operation. The ability to cancel your actions, as well as the ability to save at any point in your work and return to it later, and an even larger list of features and advantages - all this makes the work of a professional artist several times faster with the same quality. In addition, computer work is immediately ready for use in digital technologies of cinema, games, and layout - work done on the material with paints must first be transferred to digital form.

  Unique tools

  Unlike traditional painting, digital painting has progressive and high-tech functions and super-developed artistic capabilities, such as: working with layers or applying textures from photographs to the areas of the painting you need; generation of noise of a given type; various brush effects; HDR pictures; various filters, transformations and corrections; a huge number of shades of colors and textures; various line structures.

  Prospects

  Traditional art practically reached its limit in terms of perfection of technology and means back in the 18th century. Since then, almost nothing new has been added - the artist still has paints, pigment, oil (or a ready-made mixture of them), canvas and brushes. Modern computer painting is already far from the best paintings geniuses of the past in terms of the quality and scale of their work - and there is room for further development. The resolution of displays is growing, the quality of color rendering is improving, the power of computers is increasing, programs for digital painting are changing and improving, there is a fundamental possibility of creating new methods and devices for working with color/outputting color (projectors or holography).

  Availability of training and work

  If the user knows how to work on a computer and has drawing skills or has art education- it won’t work for him a lot of work understand the interface of computer painting programs - it is the same as that of most Windows programs, and has a completely logical digital artist’s toolkit. Video tutorials on working in a particular program are available on the Internet, containing a recording of all stages of the artist’s work on a digital painting.

  Disadvantages of Digital Painting

  Difficulty of mastering

  At the moment, there are very few schools or more serious educational institutions teaching in this specialty - mainly the most energetic and inquisitive people, and especially children who know how to self-learn and find information on their own, become digital artists; designers and printers (with experience working with graphics on a PC); most famous digital artists I graduated from educational institutions in traditional painting and only then independently switched to CG art. Also, a modern digital artist is unthinkable without the Internet (communication with colleagues, employers, searching for new programs or drawing methods, etc.) - and again, not everyone has it. There are practically no books on creating drawings on a computer, but the situation is gradually improving.

  As of 2007, the situation is in a fairly good position - at this moment Quite a lot of different educational resources are being made to train future art teachers to work with digital devices. Methods for working on a computer with a graphics tablet and various programs that allow you to engage in media drawing are intensively mastered. In the near future, similar courses will be launched in the main pedagogical universities of the country, which in turn will subsequently have a positive effect on schools and other universities when recruiting new teaching staff who have good experience in working with media drawing and digital painting.

  The current limit of computer technology

  Modern monitors still do not work at resolutions close to the resolution of our eyes. That is, the monitor is not capable of displaying the amount of detail that can provide live observation of a section of canvas of the same size classical painting. You can print your painting on a printer - but this gives rise to the third problem of CG art:

  Problem with outputting a computer image to a tangible medium

  Most monitors operate in the RGB color model with the sRGB color space, the color boundaries of which are not the same as those of a typical CMYK printer, which has its own color gamut limitations. As a result, some colors visible on the monitor are not printed on paper, and at the same time, the full potential of the printer in terms of coverage is not used. To solve this problem, professional monitors are used with the ARGB color space (Adobe RGB), specially designed to accommodate almost all the colors available for the printer, and color profiles are used to best match the images on the monitor and the print medium. However, 100% coincidence cannot be achieved, because Even the worst sRGB space is wider in some color areas than many CMYK spaces. Another problem is that monitors that can show all the colors of a picture (and have brightness, contrast, color settings) usually have too low a resolution that does not allow them to show all the details of the picture (they don’t show it in full size without interpolation - more than 1-2 megapixels is typical the monitor cannot show at the same time, special and quite expensive LCD monitors can show about 8 megapixels).

  Copyright issue

  Whoever has the original (source) file of the drawing is the owner of the drawing. But, like any digital information, the file can be copied and replicated in unlimited quantities without any significant costs. The simplest example protecting your drawing - posting a reduced copy on the Internet (usually professional artists They draw in high resolution - 6000×10000 pixels and even more - it’s convenient to draw details, and they post it on the Internet small option- 1600×1200 or less; or even a fragment). In this case, whoever has a large version of the drawing is its author and owner. The copyright on a digital drawing is easy to change and only well-known artists can really benefit from its presence.

  Digital painting programs

  Free Software

  • GIMP is a raster graphics editor, also suitable for drawing.
  • MyPaint is a drawing program, an endless canvas, many brushes and a minimum of functions.

  If you dream of being able to draw, but you don't have much experience, you probably associate it with a pencil. But if you really want to get your thoughts out there, a pencil isn't enough. A graphics tablet with good software is best - it has all the colors you need, and it allows you to remove any errors without a trace.

  There is one big problem with this. Although the tablet pen resembles a pencil, it can be used as a whole set of different brushes, pastels, charcoal, markers, and even an eraser. You can use it to “cover” the screen acrylic paints, oil paints and ink, and mix it all into something completely new. This is one big universal tool - and therefore cannot be used as a pencil!

  If you have some experience with pencil, even with early age and you want to use your graphics tablet effectively, you may struggle with searching good teaching for you. This is because in traditional art, “drawing” and “painting” are two completely different things, with different tools of use. In digital art, you only have one tool, the brush, so digital drawing and digital painting are combined into one. So if you're fairly comfortable with a pencil but struggle with digital art, it may not be because you "can't draw." The problem is you mix a lot of techniques, some from drawing, some from painting, so when you try to find out by searching for “digital drawing” you end up with fully drawn portraits.

  In this article, I'll explain the difference to you so you can find out exactly what you want without wasting time learning things you're not ready for. This way, you will progress faster and with less unnecessary frustration.

  Traditional drawing

  You can draw with many tools. You can even use your finger as long as you have a surface to make marks on. The most basic definition of drawing is simply creating a line using a pointed tool. “Pointiness” depends on the scale, so the larger your drawing, the blunter the tip allowed. You can even paint with a brush!

  No matter which tool you use, the method is very similar. All you can do is lead lines, straight and wavy, in different relationships to each other. An additional tool-specific feature is line darkness. Markers and fine lines give you perfectly black lines every time; soft pencils (Class B and below) allow you to choose from a whole gradient of gray; hard pencils (HB and higher) limit you to light grays. Lines do not actually exist on their own. No object is made of them, but our brains, which are very efficient at pattern recognition, don't need much to see reality in a cloud of lines. And because lines are so easy to make, drawing has become the most popular and accessible form art. And because lines are so easy to make, drawing has become the most popular and accessible art form.

  For a drawing to imitate reality, it must resemble the patterns that the brain expects. Therefore, a successful artist must know what these models are and how to create them.

  This is why realistic drawing exceeds the normal meaning of definition: it is no longer about leading lines, but about constructing meaningful patterns from them. This skill is identical for a traditional artist and a digital artist. You don't need a graphics tablet to learn how to draw animals or how to work perspective. And as a digital artist, you can successfully use tutorials for pencil users, too.

  The difference lies in the tool itself. They all make lines, but they can use different methods to do it. For example, some pens may need to control ink flow, and soft pencils give you various shades gray depending on pressure. If you are able to use soft pencil, switching to ink can be very inconvenient, and vice versa. There is another kind of pattern that you can create with drawing tools. Our brains are very sensitive to light and shadow. In a drawing we can simulate shadows with the darkness of the line and lightness with the absence of it. Because in reality light and shadow are made of spots, not lines, techniques (eg shading) must be used to simulate them.

  This effect requires another skill: understanding light and shadow and practicing in volume, imitating only with lines. To summarize, we have five different skills that graphic drawing is based on:

  • creating intentional lines with a pointed tool
  • achieving different shades
  • shading with lines
  • construction of meaningful line-based patterns based on reality analysis
  • understanding light and shadow

  You can also be a great artist by mastering just the first three skills when you're just copying references, but to become a developer you have to focus on the last two with even more effort.

  If you choose to use colored pencils, then you will also have to figure out color, which is another big task, and it's not as easy as it may seem.

  Traditional painting

  Painting is no different from drawing just because you use different tools. The purpose and effect are also completely different. Paintings are created with areas of color whose shape cannot and should not be completely controlled. You can use various pigments for this purpose. They have different densities and miscible properties, so each requires different handling.

  Areas of color can be modeled with great success, with which our brain sees the world. Paintings can be photorealistic, but they can also achieve realism with a variety of other styles. Because you can paint large areas at a time, there is no need for artificial techniques like shading, and some pigments also blend very well without more effort.

  This doesn't mean painting is easier. Using large areas requires a completely different type of analytical thinking. It's still about creating meaningful patterns, but this time it's all about light, shadow and color. Therefore, painting is based on three skills, each quite difficult to master:

  • creating intentional areas of color (controlling pigment flow, color mixing)
  • understanding light and shadow
  • understanding of color

  While in drawing you can create fantastic animals after studying animal anatomy, in painting this will not be enough. Understanding light and shadow is extremely important here unless you want to be abstract artist. Because some people think that the spots may actually be easier, but for most of us who are used to the shape of the lines, it takes a long time to learn.

  From traditional to digital art

  When you switch to Adobe Photoshop, there is only one a big difference between drawing and painting, which counts. Drawing is lines that you control, and painting is spots that you cannot completely control. In the end, not even the size of the brush matters, but its hardness. If you can foresee the drawing form before, it's probably drawing. If you're planning something unexpected, it should be painting.

  This distribution is as perfect as it can be because it takes different methods of creation into account. When you draw, no matter how chaotically, you expect some lines to appear and you will be able to draw them strongly in general outline at the end. Even when you use big, colorful strokes, you still know exactly where you want to place them. When you paint, you mix many spots together. You use the chaos your unpredictable brush creates to create something new. Painting is a process of constant fixing and adjusting - there are no perfect edges, and the final effect cannot be planned 100%. That's why we can't draw in vector (vector software cannot cope with chaos).

  Both of these approaches require different techniques. If you're familiar with drawing, your first step into painting may be trying to draw lines with an unpredictable, textured brush. You literally select a brush that is difficult to control and try to control it. This has little to do with painting!

  However, with drawing habits, you are not doomed to strict lines and flat colors forever. You just need to figure out how to mix both methods in a convenient way.

  Advanced drawing

  You can expand your drawing in Photoshop using other tools that have nothing to do with painting - or also by drawing. They don't exist in “traditional” reality, but they can be easily used if you are familiar with the drawing.

  Conversion

  There are several tools in Photoshop that can be used for this purpose:

  • Free Transform (Control-T) in Warp mode
  • Lift (Control-Shift-X) Warp
  • Editing - Puppet Warp

  All of these tools allow you to do something powerful enough to be called cheating. Once you draw something, you can change it, either completely or just part of it. You can create a completely new sketch after it's already drawn! You can even draw a bunch of chaotic lines and turn them into flesh. You just need yours analytical thinking that the drawing was based on this.

  Fill color

  If you wanted to fill an area when painting traditionally, you would have to spend a lot of time carefully intersecting the lines to create such an effect. You know exactly what you want to do - it just takes a lot of time. In Photoshop, you can draw the areas you want to color using the Lasso Tool (L). Did you notice I said “draw?” The Lasso Tool works the same way - you draw the area you want to select. Later you can fill the area with color using Paint Bucket Tool (G), and all this without a single brush stroke.

  Hatching (shading)

  By shading flat colors in a convenient way, you can simply draw shadows on separate layers, just like before - drawing with the Lasso Tool and filling them. Then by changing the Blending Mode and/or Opacity, you can make the shading match the flat colors below.

  Mixing

  To conveniently blend the border between colors and shading, you can use one of many methods. They may be considered “fake” by fans of the pictorial style, but there is nothing wrong with that.

  It's just a different style, more intuitive for people with experience in drawing.

  As long as this is your desire, you can safely use:

  • Blur Tool
  • Mix Brush Tool
  • Use the Lasso tool to select an area, then Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur

  Mixing drawing and painting

  Drawing and painting can be successfully mixed together to create great work art. There is no need to limit yourself to just one of them!

  Clipping Mask

  Painting does not know the right edges. Painting strokes go wherever they want, and trying to control them kills their spirit. In Photoshop, you can find a compromise - you can draw an area that the strokes will not cross, no matter what.

  Simply draw a shape with the Lasso Tool (L) and fill it with any color. To cut another layer, hold Alt and click the border between the two. Now you can draw anything without slowing down the outline!

  Scenic Mixing

  After drawing and coloring something, you can turn it into a painterly style simply by using the right kind of mixing. This time, instead of using the blending tool, take a textured brush with a variable Flow (the harder you press, the harder the stroke). Use the Eyedropper Tool (I) to select a color from one area, and then place a thin layer of that color on the edge. Choose a color closer to the edge and repeat.

  The better it looks without contours, the further it is from drawing and the closer it is to painting.

  Details

  When the painting is almost ready, you can give the final shine by painting in the details. You can take a nice, hard brush and add some elements that wouldn't be possible in a traditional painting. You can create a hard outline, add fine hairs here and there, and make the surface shiny by adding a white dot on it. In fact, digital painting is all about mixing both methods. When you hear the term, it is rarely about work imitating the traditional method.

  So we can say that digital drawing is about being limited to line oriented processes, while digital painting uses all possible techniques.

  Mixing Process

  A Photoshop artist can use the painting and drawing method freely at any suitable phase of the creation process. For example, if you want to create a living creature, the phases might look like this:

  • Drawing sketches indeterminate form to get an idea (painting)
  • Adjusting lines to form (drawing)
  • Cleaning lines (drawing)
  • Creating a mask (drawing)
  • Blocking Light (Drawing or Painting)
  • Mixing (painting)
  • Adding details (drawing)

  Am I drawing or painting?

  Let's sum it all up:

  1. Drawing is based on lines. You plan the skeleton as a structure according to the analysis of reality, and then slowly create more and more more lines to create a pattern that your brain will recognize.
  2. Painting is based on spots (short, three-dimensional “lines”). You start with a rough estimate of the final shape and then sculpt it, adjusting the shape with each step and making the brush smaller as you go.

  The most important skills for realistic drawing:

  • understanding the structures that make up reality (for example, the skeleton and muscles of a dog)
  • converting structures to line shapes

  In painting these skills are:

  • understanding light, shadow and color.
  • understanding the 3D shape of objects
  • mixing different sizes and colors to create true-to-life patterns

  If you are coping with all this, you need to mix both methods to increase your technological process, For example:

  • starting with a sketch and "red" line (drawing) and then coloring and shading (painting)
  • starting with a rough shape (painting), using it as a base for line art (drawing), and then coloring and shading (painting)

  Conclusion

  The most important lesson you should take from this article is that the digital creation process is not uniform. Because in Photoshop you use so many different tools with various features, they should also be used differently. By treating them all as a way of drawing (or painting), you are unnecessarily limiting yourself and your success.

  Be flexible. Use drawing techniques when they benefit you and switch to painting when it can give you more. Digital Creation This is not the only technique, and you can make the best of it if you understand which one to use in any phase.

  Again, pay attention to your weak areas and learn from them. If your shading looks bad, don't blame the colors you use, but instead go back to basic lighting principles. If you can draw beautifully, but the proportions are always off, pay attention to drawing for a while. The key is that you can see where your mistakes are coming from and which technique will exactly damage them.

  general information

  Examples of digital artists' work

  • The Inquisitor, author Ruslan Svobodin
  • Angels, author Ilya Komarov
  • Bank bridge in St. Petersburg, author B. Slobodan.
  • A flying castle for a little princess, by Eduard Mango Kichigin
  • Deisis-Presentence, author Konstantin Khudyakov (ART&SPACE Gallery, Munich)
  • God from the machine, author Evgeniy Volos

  Progress of digital painting

  At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries, CG art (Computer Graphics Art) is rapidly developing and occupies a strong position in the design of books/posters, prevails in the computer games industry and modern cinema, and is popular in amateur creativity. The reasons for the rapid displacement of previous funds from these areas:

  Availability

  In order to create digital works of any level, you need to purchase/have a personal computer of sufficient power, a graphics tablet and several programs for computer painting. All this will cost ~$1500 ( most of this amount is the cost of licensed programs) in the initial version (professionals buy more expensive computers, monitors and tablets, but they only increase the convenience of work).

  High speed

  Particularly critical in the field of paid artistic activity: design of books, films, games. Specialized programs for CG artists (for example Painter) contain a large number of tools that speed up work. Choosing the right color is a matter of seconds (unlike traditional painting, where you have to mix paints to get the right color - requires experience and time), choosing the right brush/tool ​​is also an almost instantaneous operation. The ability to cancel your actions, as well as the ability to save at any point in your work and return to it later, and an even larger list of features and advantages - all this makes the work of a professional artist several times faster with the same quality. In addition, computer work is immediately ready for use in digital technologies of cinema, games, and layout - a canvas painted in oil must first be transferred to digital form.

  Unique tools

  For example, working with layers or applying textures from photographs to the areas of the painting you need; generation of noise of a given type; various brush effects; HDR pictures; various filters and corrections - all this and much more is simply not available in traditional painting.

  Prospects

  Traditional art practically reached its limit in terms of perfection of technology and means back in the 18th century. Since then, nothing new has been added - you still have pigment, oil (or a ready-made mixture of them), canvas and brushes. And nothing new will appear. It’s fair to say that modern computer painting is still far from the best paintings of the geniuses of the past in terms of quality and scale of work - but it has room to develop. The resolution of monitors is growing, the quality of color rendering is improving, the power of computers is growing, programs for digital painting are changing and improving, there is a fundamental possibility of creating new methods and devices for working with color/outputting color (projectors or holography).

  Ease of use by some groups of people and ease of operation

  If you know how to work on a computer and are an inquisitive and energetic person, it will not be difficult for you to understand the interface of computer painting programs - it is the same as most Windows programs + a completely logical digital artist’s toolkit. Both paid and free video lessons on working in a particular program are available on the Internet. In relation to cg-art programs, such video tutorials contain a recording of all stages of the digital artist’s work on a painting.

  Disadvantages of Digital Painting

  Difficulty of mastering

  At the moment, there are very few schools or more serious educational institutions teaching in this specialty - mainly the most energetic and inquisitive people, and especially children who know how to self-learn and find information on their own, become digital artists; designers and printers (with experience working with graphics on a PC); Most famous digital artists graduated from educational institutions in traditional painting and only then independently switched to CG art. Also, a modern digital artist is unthinkable without the Internet (communication with colleagues, employers, searching for new programs or drawing methods, etc.) - and again, not everyone has it. There are practically no books on creating drawings on a computer, but the situation is gradually improving.

  As of 2007, the situation is in a pretty good position - at the moment, quite a lot of different educational resources are being made to train future art teachers to work with digital devices. Methods for working on a computer with a graphics tablet and various programs that allow you to engage in media drawing are intensively mastered. In the near future, similar courses will be launched in the main pedagogical universities of the country, which in turn will subsequently have a positive effect on schools and other universities when recruiting new teaching staff who have good experience in working with media drawing and digital painting.

  The current limit of computer technology

  Modern monitors still do not work at resolutions close to the resolution of our eyes. That is, the monitor is not capable of displaying such a quantity of detail that can provide live observation of a section of a classical painting of the same size. You can print your painting on a printer - but this gives rise to the third problem of CG art:

  Problem with outputting a computer image to a tangible medium

  Monitors operate in the RGB color space - 16.7 million colors. Printing on paper cannot physically cover this entire range of colors - the CMYK color space covers a smaller number of colors and shades. At this point in time, inkjet large-format photo printers, such as Canon or HP, exist and are increasingly used. Such printers operate in the RGB color space with a resolution of 1200-2400 dpi and can print on various, sometimes exotic, printing media. However, the cost of such work is very high. Monitors that can show all the colors of a picture (and have settings for brightness, contrast, color) have too low a resolution that does not allow them to show all the details of the picture (they don’t show it in full size without interpolation - a regular monitor cannot show more than 1-2 megapixels at the same time , special and quite expensive LCD monitors can show about 8 megapixels).

  Copyright issue

  Whoever has the original (source) file of the drawing is the owner of the drawing. But, like any digital information, the file can be copied and replicated in unlimited quantities without any significant costs. The simplest example of protecting your drawing is posting a small copy on the Internet (usually professional artists draw in high resolution - 6000x10000 pixels or even more - it’s convenient to draw details, but they post a small version on the Internet - 1600x1200 or less; or even a fragment). In this case, whoever has a large version of the drawing is its author and owner. The copyright on a digital drawing is easy to change and only well-known artists can really benefit from its presence.

  Links

  External links to Russian-language forums

  where artists of all genres communicate

  • - 2D artists forum. Founder ash.
  • Skill.ru is a creativity site where everyone can post their work (any - from photographs to poetry) and learn the harsh public opinion at their expense. Or get well-deserved recognition during your lifetime - it depends on your luck.
  • Hofarts.com is a forum with a specialized “School” section and a CG news magazine.
  • Guro art forum is a specialized forum founded famous artist Roman Guro Gunyav in December 2002
  • CGFight.com is a forum specializing in “fights” and competitions between artists (including team ones).
  • CGTalk.ru - forum on CGTalk.ru
  • Manga.ru - forum for artists in the manga style
  • Real time is a subsection of the Real Time school. One of the few institutions that trains computer art in all directions (2D, 3D). At the beginning of the development of the forum, the direction of the drawing was led by the most famous Russian CG artist - Anry. The forum is currently inactive, but the archives are very useful for both beginners and professionals.
  • Arttalk.ru - Community of creative people
  • Render.ru - online magazine on computer graphics and animation
  • artburn - Collection of CG artists.
  • “A Certain Aesthetics” is a community of young artists. The founder is the famous artist Ketka.
  • Sketchers.ru is a somewhat younger resource that has many convenient functions (magazines, galleries) for artists. Founded on January 17, 2004 by artist/designer AJ. This domain is currently not working. 2010.01.10
  • ecreatorman.com is an original site for creating collective digital canvases.
  • PointArt - Portal for artists.
  • DigitalBrush - Gallery of original works by leading digital artists.
  • ArtTower.ru is an art forum dedicated to computer graphics, drawing and photography. Available electronic journal ArtTower Magazine. Contains a regularly updated catalog of lessons for beginners.
  • - All about graphics, art forum.
  • - Design and graphics.

  External links to foreign forums and artist communities

  • pixiv.net in Japanese

  Digital painting programs

  Free Software

  • GIMP is a raster graphics editor, also suitable for drawing.
  • MyPaint is a drawing program, an endless canvas, many brushes and a minimum of functionality.
  • Krita is a drawing program, part of the Calligra Suite.
  • Alchemy-
  • Inkscape is a vector graphics editor designed for drawing.

  Proprietary programs

  • Painter - A program from Corel for digital artists.

  Last week the company Wacom, a virtual monopolist in the world of digital drawing, introduced a new technology WILL– Wacom Ink Layer Language. This is a new universal standard that provides cross-platform and working together locally or in the cloud, regardless of device and ecosystem. The technology involves the use of not only specialized tablets for digital painting, but also smartphones and regular tablet computers equipped with styluses.

  Digital painting, that is, the creation of electronic paintings using computer simulations of artistic tools, is a very interesting field. We don't hear every week big news about a new graphics tablet and we don’t wait with bated breath for new tools, however, this area of ​​​​consumer electronics is steadily and continuously developing.

  
  

  not at all as highly specialized as, say, programming. The availability of technology and tools allows even non-professional artists to create their own digital paintings. How has this industry developed and what can await us in the future? Let's try to find out! The direction of digital painting is quite young, which is obvious - for its emergence it was necessary to sufficiently develop computers and information input and output devices. In general, no one knows the exact date of the first computer drawing. And what can be considered such? Should pseudographics be classified as digital drawing or not? The first noticeable and colorful works made on a computer appeared in the mid-90s of the last century, when widespread use of SVGA monitors

  and video cards capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. Interestingly, the ancestor of modern digital artist tools, the first graphics tablet, appeared long before the development of personal computers. In 1888, a certain Elisha Gray patented the first graphics tablet. But the first device, really similar to modern ones, consisting of a pen and a flat pressure-sensitive device, worked in conjunction with a computer Stylator

  and was used for handwriting in 1957.

  
  

  In 1964, a graphics tablet was introduced, which used a grid of semiconductors under the input surface to which ternary Gray code-encoded electrical pulses were applied. The pen received this signal, which could then be decoded back into coordinates. But the first consumer graphics devices called KoalaPad

  
  

  were designed to work with Apple II computers, their history began in 1984. Along with the tablet, the user was offered special drawing software. Over time, Koala tablets began to work with other computers (the graphics program for the IBM PC was called PC Design), and soon the market for consumer tablets expanded - new companies entered it. Since the end of the twentieth century, the rapid development of digital painting or(Computer Graphics Art). The reason for this was, firstly, accessibility. In order to draw on a computer, in addition to the computer itself, it was necessary to purchase only a graphics tablet and software. The second reason for the increase in popularity was the increase in the speed of the artist’s work. Graphics programs offer a large number of tools, not to mention a rich palette of colors. A modern artist only needs to make two mouse clicks to select desired color– there is no need to buy and mix paints. And don’t forget about the biggest advantage of a computer - any erroneous action in the program can be easily undone. IN digital drawing it is easier to make changes, and you can send it to the destination address immediately upon completion - there is no need to wait for the paint to dry and transfer the canvas to digital media.

  

  The growing popularity of the technology has allowed the development of the corresponding tools - in the arsenal of a modern digital artist, illustrator or graphic designer there is a huge number of effects, brushes and filters that are simply not available in traditional painting.

  U digital painting great prospects, but also great limitations. Since the 18th century there has been virtually no traditional art technical development, modern artists create with almost the same set of tools as their colleagues did a hundred years ago: canvas, brushes, oil... But at the same time, every year the resolution and pixel density of displays increases, the quality of color rendition improves, computing power grows, software develops - all this is a determining factor for the development of digital drawing. This is on the one hand. On the other hand, the resolution of modern monitors is still far from the resolution of the human eye; the monitor is not capable of displaying the amount of detail that can provide live observation of a section of a classical painting of the same size.

  
  

  Another modern problem with digital painting is simply the lack of appropriate educational institutions. Digital artist today he is, in fact, self-taught. Most famous digital artists graduated from educational institutions in traditional painting and only then independently switched to digital creativity.

  Although there are very few manuals on digital painting, the choice of graphics tablets on the market is quite extensive. Company models are popular in Russia Genius And . The cheapest model costs a little more than a thousand rubles, but a professional tool with a large diagonal and functionality can cost 200 thousand rubles.

  Date of publication: 04/21/2012

  This article is the second part of a series of articles about computer graphics. In we learned about how special effects are made in the film industry, and also followed historical development special effects in cinema.

  So let's continue...

  Digital painting

  Digital painting is the creation of electronic images through computer imitations of the artist’s traditional means (my free interpretation of the concept from Wikipedia). In fact, you'll almost never see a computer artist using the term "digital painting." Firstly, because there is already a foreign abbreviation - CG artist (sometimes CG specialist). Secondly, those works of art (that’s right!) that such artists create do not really fall under the definition of “painting”. Thirdly, everyone is already accustomed to using the abbreviation CG, since it is generally understood by Russians, Americans, Chinese, etc.

  The concept of “art” came to us from Latin and Italian languages: art – art, artistry, skill. Usually among CG artists, the work is called 2d art (if drawn on a tablet) and 3d art (if done in a three-dimensional editor).

  2DArt

  The work process is very similar to the work process of an ordinary artist. Only instead of an easel there is a monitor and a tablet.

  Since previously monitors were limited in color scheme(and even earlier they were monochrome), then digital painting appeared only when svga monitors and video cards appeared.

  Having a tablet with an artist is a mandatory attribute for the drawing process. And don't confuse tablet computers with drawing tablets. A digital painting tablet looks something like this:

  You simply draw on such a tablet with a special pen (pen, brush, sometimes a “stick” - a plastic stick), and what you draw is displayed on the monitor screen, namely in the graphics editor window.

  Everyone uses it graphic editor, in which it is more convenient for him to work. But the most commonly used “Photoshop” is Adobe Photoshop.

  Why do CG artists draw on tablets... At least try to draw an oval using a mouse! No matter how developed the technology is, you will still have to draw with your hands (and some people can draw with their feet). This means that to become a good CG artist, you need to be able to draw well on paper, know the basics of perspective and everything else that you can learn in art school.

  Entirely computer-drawn paintings and images have many useful qualities. Firstly, such work is easier to redo. If the customer does not like your work (painted on canvas), you will be forced to completely redraw it from scratch. Of course, small details can be fixed, but significant changes cannot be made. But a CG artist will simply open a file of his work in Photoshop, where all his changes are scattered in layers. Then he will edit the necessary layers and get an improved work. This way, artists can rework, for example, the background, which is impossible to achieve on canvas.

  Secondly, if you need to transfer a painting on canvas into digital form, then it is simply scanned. No matter how good and high-quality the scanner is, the quality component will still be lost during scanning. But a painting completely created on a computer can be drawn in great quality, and then it can be printed either the size of a picture in a book or the size of a house (the main thing is in what resolution the artist worked).

  Here step by step example creating the work “On Tall Trees” by artist Anastasia Kustova in Adobe Photoshop:

  

  

  

  As you can see, it all starts with a sketch, then the details are worked out. In the first part of the article about computer graphics, I provided a list of sites where you can see amazing works. And since not all people have time to visit art galleries, but everyone has access to the Internet, then everyone can join art. Who knows, maybe very soon digital painting will replace classic way drawing...

  Here are examples of several works performed exclusively using computers and digital means:

  

  

  

  

  To create a picture using a 3D editor, you first need to model all the objects in the scene, then apply textures to them and adjust the lighting. And after setting up the scene, it is rendered. Rendering is the process of drawing a three-dimensional scene as a two-dimensional image. Those. with this kind of work you need to be able not so much to draw as to be able to model (the process is similar to creating a sculpture).

  

  

  

  

  Work done in 3D editors has several advantages.
  Firstly, a ready-made scene can be rendered from different viewing angles, resulting in a new composition. Secondly, if you need to print an image on a huge poster, then in the rendering settings you can specify any resolution (depending on the power of the computer). Thirdly, such a scene can be used to create animated film or interactive presentation. Those. In 3D editors you can create both special effects for films and create masterpieces in the form of paintings.

  Here are examples of 3D art:

  

  

  

  

  That's all. On my own behalf, I would like to add that the ability to draw well and the ability to transfer one’s mental images to a canvas or to a computer monitor is positive quality person. Learn to draw! You don’t have to paint like Van Gogh or Shishkin, you don’t have to take special courses. There are now many tutorials, video tutorials and other useful things on the Internet. The ability to draw means the ability to fantasize, the ability to concentrate and the ability to endure. In general, go for it! Take a pencil in your hand and start drawing something right now! Who knows, maybe you have talent and you will become the new Picasso, or you will create special effects for Hollywood blockbusters...