More about digital painting

The June issue of ‘the Artist’ contains a letter I wrote in response to the rather disappointing series of articles about digital methods that appeared in the magazine. The series was disappointing because the articles just dealt with manipulating photographs in Adobe Photoshop. The point of the letter was to point out that a more creative use of digital software was to begin with a drawing or sketch rather than a photograph. As a simple example I used a plein air charcoal sketch and then developed it with digital brushwork applied by hand. The result can be seen by visiting this link: http://www.robertkirk.co.uk/digitalPics/herm/herm.html There was one other letter from a reader who had a rather sad experience with Photoshop. She used it to manipulate some of her artwork and achieved ‘magical’ results. Trouble was she tried to reproduce the technique with more artwork but didn’t succeed in improving on the originals. This is a common problem – adjusting saturation, contrast and brightness does not always produce the results you expect. Hand crafted painting or artwork have unique properties which should be respected. Digital tinkering with them is not the way to go.