Computers and “John, don’t you think it sad you don’t paint anymore?”

The whole argument about ‘real paintings’ and ‘digital paintings’ always makes me smile. I can see why some say to me how sad it is that for the last few years I have not ‘got my paints out’, and on one level it is. All my life I have played with paint, made a mess with colour, used oils, turpentine, cleaned brushes, stretched paper, struggled with a damn airbrush, bought stay-wet palettes etc. etc.- all great and a really experience. But for me, there is a big BUT... Yes I did hundreds of actual paintings you could physically hold in you hand- great! However from a commercial point of view (even us artists have to pay fuel bills, pay the mortgage and feed our kids) painting and ‘business’ always seemed at odds. There are really two separate issues here: one of the craft of how you actually work, the second what you want to achieve. From a ‘craft’ standpoint, no doubt nothing beats the tactile physicality of painting- as an event in itself, truly wonderful. From a commercial, business standpoint, for some it can still be wonderful and works fine.

My experience is very black and white. If I had endless weeks to spend on each painting and the client / customer wanted to hold the artwork in their hand, painting is the winner. But as this is my business and many of the jobs are very challenging to do ‘time’ becomes an issue- as any working artist will say. We are ruled my the DEADLINE and in this world you can be the best artists around, but if your always late, the client won’t come back- end of story. So if there is an easier way, which paradoxically for me is a better, more appropriate, only a fool would not take it...

Here are many reasons why I now prefer to paint digitally, as a paid professional artist. I must stress this is just how it is for myself and other creative individuals might radically disagree!

1. Being in control of the design and feel
   I can (and this is truly glorious) make changes, quite easily, right up to the last second. With physical art, if the foreground figure, for example, looked fine when it was on the sketch, you may well feel it’s actually not quite in the right place, as the painting progresses. If your doing the piece digitally with a layer, say in photoshop (my main software) you can nudge the figure over a bit, till it just sits right. If that mountain range now looks a bit too high, you can even move a damn mountain down a bit!!! If the sky is now too colorful and competes with the central character, in a second- you can desaturate it, or experiment with making it a totally different colour. None of these things I could do easily with flat art, but now you can be in control and ‘experiment’, possibly getting closer to that perfect elusive point... ok that does not exist! but the possibilities are much larger, especially with design and composition.

2. Corrections
   The client e-mails you “we don’t like the lightning coming out of the Dragons mouth...” So, in the old days, this meant physically painting out the lightning and retouching the bit underneath- cost to me- sometimes about 2-3 hours and much irritation. Now digitally maybe about 10 mins (even less if it’s on a layer). Don’t get me wrong I still hate corrections they are an utter pain, but the clients paying for the work- so give them what they want!

3. Going wrong
   So your having a bad day. You trip over the cat and spill your coffee, the car won’t start and your probably coming down with a bad cold. It’s raining, the washing machine breaks down and the kids shoes are covered in mud. You start work with a brain full of ‘sh--t’ and what a surprise, you mess up your painting! Done this many a time and just part of life... BUT with a computer, you can’t damage the file of the day before, you just maybe loose, at worse a days time. BUT what is much much worse- is before computers, I needed to paint part of the thing back again to where it was, and if substantial, believe me- an awfully frustrating thing. This is probably the single biggest element that computers have brought me!

4. The benefit of hindsight
   Leading on from the above- sometimes I know something is wrong and I just can’t find the hidden clue. I know it’s there, but damn me if I can work it out. Digitally you can try things out, sometimes very fundamental things. I did an “Orrery” up in the sky, for Magic a few years back, when painting, it was all going fine, but fundamentally it just looked very average. No amount of detail, clever lighting made it better and just looked too ‘normal’. So finally in the last hour, I tilted the entire image to the side, stretched the perspective, desaturated most of the colour and put in a yellow zing flash of lightning. BINGO! in under 3 minuets suddenly it “felt” right. So anyone who says computers are not instinctive is in this case utterly wrong, they are just a fantastic tool that enables you to to do ‘great’ things. In many respects I am lucky to have only had access to this technology over the last 10-12 years, and really have experienced the best of both worlds. Pat my illustrator wife, sometimes scans in one of her watercolours, we experiment, come up with a solution, print it out- she then has a test sheet to work from, without ruining her actual painting!

5. Delivery, sending and printing
   You can quickly send the art to the client for approval, you can send the file to a mate for an opinion, you can send it to the printers for proofing AND if your monitor is calibrated properly (if you understand cmyk values correctly) you can predict more accurately what it will look like in print. We live in a day and age when you can buy a superb printer for £100 and zoom out copies of your picture, actually seeing how it will print with the standard 4 colour process. You can print copies to give to your friends, make an easy folio or on good paper sell prints and make some money or just use them for promotion. Yes you can scan in physical art, but if it is digital, your bypassing the scanning / colour correction stage and the process is much much easier.