[Kaimee]: 5.Random Essays.Digital Arts

This is a bit of a poncy informal essay, written on my art teacher's request for a seminar about modern technology and it's influence on art.
In actuality I tend more towards messing with inks, watercolours, pencils, paints, and guoache (sp?), but digital arts is what they wanted so I did my best to show people how I felt about it.

Digital Art - The New Medium

I am Kate Aimee Conrick, an 18 year old college student and I want a career in Digital Arts and Design. After discovering the extremely broad range of possibilities and potential the digital medium had to offer, I cannot imagine my life moving in any other direction, and I am already making use of the digital medium in my works and several independent projects. I am intending to go to art school to study them, and I have been looking at several different Universities with this in mind, and I see this as where my life is heading.
However, the most important piece of artwork in my life is currently made not only using only traditional media, but purposely excluding the digital media. This piece is an Artist’s book, created for a college arts major piece, and this work is the history of who I am, and how I came to be this person. The section of my life that contains digital arts is in my future, this work is the story of my beginning and how I got here, and as such it is one of the most important things I will ever do for myself before I move into the world of Digital Arts.

Several years ago I discovered the digital medium – Computer Generated Art or CG for short. Many artists hear the words ‘digital art’ and immediately follow the common misconception of thinking solely in terms of 3D animation - think SHREK - and discount the idea immediately as “not real art”. However Digital Arts can be of almost any type; digital imaging, digital photography, digital painting or drawing, animation, video, and web design are only a few of the most popular. Digital arts and traditional arts that are merged with computer technology are as valid an artistic medium as any other, although they are only beginning to gain in the popularity and recognition they deserve.

Digital painting is the term applied to art that is enhanced or created entirely using various computer drawing and painting software. This software generally contains tools that emulate realistic mediums, but have the added quality of being infinitely manipulable, far past the normal boundaries of the actual mediums.
Aside from the added benefits of not having to wait for paint to dry, I can pick and choose the qualities from any medium I choose, combine them, change them, or multiply them with only a quick adjustment. I can paint as if with watercolour over heavy impasto, or blend the strokes of any medium as if they were oil. The mediums are extremely pliable, breaking the everyday boundaries of wet or dry paint, badly mixed materials, or even oil on water. Anything can be put down in one layer, and undone again in a second, or moved to the foreground, background, made opaque or transparent. Digital art truly is the medium of the future, surpassing all boundaries of our past materials, and carrying the best qualities ahead.

That is not to say that I believe traditional mediums to be a thing of the past.
I love computers. My poison of choice is digital painting and web design, my weapons of choice are Corel Painter, Open Canvas and a Wacom Graphire3 Graphics Tablet and stylus. However, the skills these employ are based on a working knowledge of the traditional mediums, and to properly make use of the removal of ordinary limits on our mediums, the artist must be fully aware of what they are.
I learnt my mediums backwards.
Stepping into the land of the infinitely manipulable mediums in digital art with only basic grounding in the general painting, drawing, and colouring mediums, I learnt colours, composition, style and content in a way that allowed me to adjust anything immediately. If the texture was too rough it would change. If the paint was wet, it would dry. If a mistake was made you could erase it, undo it, go over it, or use a different medium entirely to replace it. Images could be drawn by hand and then modified using the digital graphics technology. In truth, the limits that make learning harder for everyone else meant nothing to me.

When I first discovered the digital medium I was still at the stage where pens and pencils were my only mediums. Now, I have a working knowledge of most of the common mediums, and while I will, of course, continue to use them for the rest of my life and combine them with my digital arts, the lack of boundaries the technology offers is overwhelmingly appealing, and I intend to study it seriously, and make it a part of my life.

A recent art project of mine for a college art major was creating an Artist’s Book, a series of pieces about who I am, and what my life, likes and surroundings mean to me. The book was created out of three long 15 x 60cm pieces, folded into a concertina shape. The pieces were illustrated on both sides using gouache, inks and felt tip pens, and fitted together to fold up into a small cover.
Each piece held a rich panorama of the scenes, sights and thoughts that make up my life. The images vary between my surroundings; the sights and skies that I love, and the views I know off by heart, and handwritten text, positioned in different orientations, where ever it fit, all throughout the piece. The text explores all the memories and thoughts that are essential in knowing who I am today.
The piece is illustrated largely in either black silhouettes or bright pastel colours. Although in digital arts I tend towards darker colours and tones, using deeper browns and blues, and warm yellows, the book was intended to capture the way I see the world, and I am still seeing it as black and white, or in this case; black or bright. My memories of life could be catalogued by a series of shots of the sunset, with silhouettes of my home and surroundings lit up against them. As of yet I have not been witness to any great horror, and so I still see my life in the rosy glow of the very young.

Apart from the content of the book, the actual mediums used to create it played an important part in what it means to me. To create this book I stayed away from the digital arts. While they do play a part in who I am now, they mark the beginning of a new part of my life. When I discovered digital arts, a whole new vista of art - and what I in particular could do with art - opened up to me. This book traces my beginning, and how I got to be who I am now. From here on in my life could be anything, but I plan for it to be something involving digital arts.
That is why it was important to me to do this piece properly. This piece is like the journal of my life up until this stage, and I am going to change a lot during the rest of my life.
This piece isn’t a record of who I was dating and when, or my favourite café or hat. This is a book of everything that is always in the back of my head, and every thought, scene, and feeling that has made me who I am. The book is not a comment on society or the political issues of these times, but on my mindset of today, what captured me and how I saw my life at 18 years old, just heading out into life.

Now, I am currently working with a view to applying to the ANU Computer Arts Studio at the School of Arts, although I will also be applying to various other universities teaching digital arts and graphic design, such as the University of Canberra, Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, University of Newcastle and the RMIT University, all of which teach a combination of Graphic design, illustration, typography, computer graphics, architecture and landscape architecture, and colour and design principles that interest me.

It seems obvious enough to me, from the areas I have been tending towards, that the Digital medium is going to play a large part in my life and I intend to pursue it.
If I do not end up attending art school to study the digital arts then I will most probably continue doing as I do now, and build up my knowledge, my portfolio, and my career as they come to me. I have recorded the way I see the world now, at 18, but already it is starting to change. The Digital Arts will make up a large part of my future, and whether I go on to practise them as a career or simply for myself, they will henceforth play a steady part in my life.

© Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!