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Digital painting and drawing is a wonderful new medium with its own unique qualities and limitations. It doesn't replicate the feel and look of traditional forms exactly just as pastels don't have the same look or feel as oils. But the techniques themselves are not so far removed from those used in other art forms. The thing to remember is that although you might be trying to recreate a painted look, the techniques you use to achieve it are more similar to those of pen & ink, clay modelling and printmaking.

Broadly speaking, there are four main varieties of computer art: digital drawing, digital painting, image manipulation and 3D modelling.

Digital drawing or illustration (found in software packages like Illustrator) is called Vector art. Vector art is like screen printing. You carve out precise shapes which you then fill with color and assemble together to produce a strong graphic image.

Digital painting and image manipulation use raster' art, which lays down individual pixels of color similar to the way a newspaper is printed. Digital painting packages try to replicate the marks made by paint and brush. A watercolour brush, for example, may have darkened edges to give the look of wetness, while a pastel or chalk brush' scatters the points of color to give the impression of dry media. The brush heads themselves are basically stamps which you drag, stamp or stipple so it's a bit more like using a sponge and ink pen than a loaded brush. A good graphics tables allows you to vary the flow of ink' according the angle or pressure you use with the pen, much as you would do with a normal liquid ink pen. You can also use brushes without color to smear and blend, or select a different paper' surface to brush the marks across.

Image manipulation is like using a highly advanced digital darkroom. You can transform a whole or selected portion of an existing image - dye it different colors, distort it, create montages etc.

3D modelling is just what it says on the can the digital answer to clay. You sculpt objects or figures from scratch which are then painted with different textural materials to look realistic. But there is a difference. You are still working with a two-dimensional image and making a 2D image look 3D needs light and shadow, so you also need to create and position a light source and choose a viewpoint for the observer.

For artists who already experiment with different media, I don't think the move to digital art is really that much of a leap. The artistic skills you need to use this new medium are probably already there!

Learn more about this author, Adele Gregory.
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