What is the Significance of Being Able to Combine Digital and Traditional Art?
This month I (Isabelle C.) will be presenting at the HAS meeting about how you can take existing art and add to it through digital art. In addition to this presentation, I wanted to highlight in this article the significance of combining traditional and digital art.
I started combining traditional and digital art two years ago when I took a graphic design class and started manipulating photos together in the computer program Adobe Photoshop. After that I learned that both my traditional photographs and my own artwork could be combined with my new digital art skills. This led to me taking my own traditional illustrations and then doing lineart or color digitally. After this I transitioned to taking photographs and combining them together to create new images.
Each stage of this digital art style helped me develop my own sense of how to combine these images to create new artwork. The significance of this style of digital art is not just that you have created a new piece of art with existing ones, but that you have the ability to create effects that cannot be obtained in traditional mediums. For example, I am a fantasy photographer, which means I take traditional photos of castles or castle-like buildings and edit them to look like they would be in a fantasy world. This image (see image of castle with article) was actually three different images together. I would have not been able to easily capture the ravens flying around the castle or the correct lighting with just digital photography in this location, but through editing with digital art I was able to obtain the effects that I wanted. I was able to draw the smoke effect around the castle digitally and bring the whole image together in a way that would not have been possible in traditional photography where I was photographing.
How can this apply to paintings, drawings, or any other type of digital art? It can really apply however you would like! You can add lineart to a painting digitally or even make it look 3D. If you weren’t able to achieve the tones of color you wanted traditionally, you can edit them in with digital art. Any way you use it can help turn your traditional art into another piece or even help you achieve an effect you wanted to add to your digital art.
If you would like to see a live demonstration of how to combine digital and traditional art, come to this month’s HAS meeting on
WEDNESDAY MAY 11 where I will be presenting with Meredith S. about how to use digital tools to create new artwork!
