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PART II - Humanizing the Machine |
| In part one I discussed some misconceptions about computer art, and the importance of not letting presets and filters take over your creative process. Before you wonder if I am one who rejects modern technology, let me say that it is quite possible to use the computer creatively, and to have the computer adjust to your own creative needs, rather than the artist bending to adapt to the computer. The computer is just a machine. It is a powerful and extremely useful machine, but it cannot create. That is the job of the artist. Numerous software developers have created a number of brilliant applications that allow an artist remarkable avenues of creativity. In addition to what these developers have provided, you can expand the creative possibilities of these applications even further. Let’s begin by looking at a few of these programs. There are many more than I can list, particularly when you include obscure programs or shareware applications, but I will cover several of the more popular ones. I’ll presume your familiarity with applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter, and the advantages of as good graphics tablet. While Photoshop is often regarded as an image correction and manipulation tool, it can work marvelously as a creative paint program too. Painter is set up to emulate a wide variety of traditional artist’s materials, from oil paint, to chalk, to watercolor and pencil. In addition, Painter offers numerous textures based on various drawing papers, canvas, and odd surfaces to draw or paint on. This is a good time to discuss the concept of the metaphor. Just as Magritte reminds us that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” that a painting of a pipe is not actually a pipe, we should keep in mind that Painter’s oil paint is not really oil paint. These are wonderful recreations of traditional materials, but they are metaphors for the real items. There is nothing at all wrong with this. In fact, it seems the perfect starting point. By starting with digital tools that resemble the traditional tools we are familiar with, we can see how these tools can be tweaked, adjusted, and fine-tuned into the precise tool we want. This is the perfect “what if” tool. “What if I could have an oil paint brush, but with larger hairs, or hairs made of marble textures, and what if I could paint watercolor type glazes on top of the oil, and what if...” This is where it gets exciting. All the presets can be adjusted to suit your own needs. One can even create a grayscale image to create a new brush. Playing around with this one concept, I found that some images work better than others as brushes. I suppose any image can work as a brush, depending on what you are trying to do, but I find vignetted images that are softened at the edges usually work best. If harder edges are preferred, then I’d suggest irregular textured edges. A good place to start is to create a rough surfaced image much larger than you will need. Make a circular, or irregular shaped selection, and feather rather heavily. Copy and paste this selection into a new white background, and crop outside the image. Capture this image as your brush. You will immediately find a wide range of textures, particularly using different settings for dab, stroke type, method and spacing. Still it will take some practice to fine tune these brushes to avoid obviously repeating patterns or irritating artifacts. The great news is that it is fun, and even addictive, to practice these concepts. I would suggest that is pretty rare when you will need to create a brush with an image larger than 300 pixels square. Much larger images will require more memory, and can slow down the applications performance. Painter, in particular, does a great job of scaling these brushes larger without excessive degradation of the brush images. While I am still discussing Painter, allow me to single out a particularly useful tool, the watercolor brush. Watercolor brushes are unique in that they work on a separate “wet” layer, until you decide to dry them. This allows several possibilities. Play around with adding a watercolor layer on a near finished painting, and experiment with brushing, erasing, diffusing, etc. and see how this creates a tint over the layer below. Once you find a look you are satisfied with, you may “dry” that layer, making it now part of the painting below. You can also continue to paint new wet layers on top, and dry in stages. If one works slowly and subtly, this is extremely useful for building up textures and glazes. Try painting in a wet layer with a tint of sepia. You can do this with a broad watercolor brush, or perhaps use the spatter watercolor for texture. If this is too harsh, don’t overlook the Diffuse option, Shift-D, that will diffuse whatever is painted on the watercolor layer. You may also add diffusion to any of the existing watercolor brushes with the “diffusion” slider under “water” controls. Without drying, you can lift out hi-lights with the Pure Water Brush, or almost any watercolor brush with white as your color. This technique is very useful for selective tinting. Remember to “dry” your finished painting. A quick suggestion regarding the use of paper textures with “Apply Surface Texture,” “Color Overlay,” or “Dye Concentration,” is to do it slowly, and in several applications. If you particularly want a specific paper texture to be recognizable, then a couple of applications at a low setting may be all you need. If you want a texture, but do not want it to be an obvious pattern, like canvas or stone, but would prefer something more mysterious and ambiguous, try applying the texture very softly, like an amount setting of 8%, then scaling it to an arbitrary number (not an even division or multiple like 25%, 50%, 200%, etc.) and applying again at a low setting. I would not go to large changes, but stay within 20-30% of the original size. Random numbers like 107%, 93%, 112%, and so on, will break up the initial pattern over three or four light applications. Of course, changing to another texture altogether helps further. Specific to “Apply Surface Texture, “I find the “shine” setting to be often too harsh, and tend to set that to zero. This is just personal taste; Experiment to find your own look. Moving onto Photoshop, we have many similar tools, but a different way of using them. The individual tools—brushes, airbrush, pencil, eraser—do not have the range of control that the brushes in Painter have, but that does not mean you as the artist have less control. The suggestion above regarding the use of grayscale images to create new brushes applies just as well here. |
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Amazing things can be done with alpha channels. There is not enough room to explain what an alpha channel is here, so I’ll refer you to the Photoshop manual, or suggest you search out articles specific to alpha channels. There are some uses of these alpha channels that are not generally covered, however. One can load their own paper texture (try a medium gray with noise at “25” for starters) from an alpha channel to create paper textures similar to those in Painter. Textured alpha channels can also be loaded, and filters applied to the resulting selections, to create an unusual partly-filtered image. Most importantly, alpha channels are used much like selections, to limit a paint effects such as airbrush, or a filter, to a specific area. In addition to the paint tools and filters, experiment with adjustment tools such as Hue/Saturation, Levels, Color Balance, and Variations, particularly within a selection, to see more ways of adjusting an image. I wrote about filters in my earlier piece, and discussed ways that they are often used in an overpowering and clichéd manner. This is not a put down of the filters, but a recommendation of how to use them more productively, and with subtlety. The problems arise, in part, as a result of these tools being so darned fascinating and seductive to use. They produce such wonderful textures and patterns, and “stuff” all on their own, it is very tempting to stand back, and let them have free reign. This is part of human nature. People love toys, and love to play. What comes to mind immediately is the guitarist who just bought his new “Wah-wah” pedal, and insists on using it on everything he plays, regardless how inappropriate. Eventually, the guitarist will burn out on this new toy, and get around to only using it when it is a useful tool. That is pretty much where the artist is with these incredible tools. No one is wrong for allowing themselves to become obsessed with these wonderful toys. The question becomes one of learning to use them with discretion. Rather than suggest that the artist use restraint, and self-control, I would suggest the artist dive in, and play with these filters. Go ahead and make the floating chrome spheres reflecting psychedelic textures. Fill selections with wild fractals, apply blurs, paint with the airbrush in difference mode. Try every conceivable variation. Seriously; I’m not being derisive. What I am suggesting here is not a way to create finished art, but a way to learn the tools. I do this often, but keep these studies to myself. Think of this purely as an exercise, not art. Literally, go through each and every filter, and every preset, and give it a try at various settings. Many of these require an existing image to apply an effect to, such as most blur filters. Try combinations of filters together. Try layering effects on different layers, using different transfer modes. See what happens when you copy an image to another layer in difference mode (it will be black). See what happens when you add a heavy gaussian blur to the top image, and flatten. See what happens when you brighten the resulting image with Levels. You may get nothing, depending on the initial image, or you may get some wild effects. Most of these exercises will produce garbage, and that’s fine. It is just as important to know what not to do. But you will also find some gems. Basically try every technique and trick, until you are sick of them! At that point, you are ready to begin using them tastefully. Now, as you work on a painting, and you feel an object looks pretty good, but could use just a little texture, you should be able to use, let’s say, KPT Texture Explorer at a setting on “1” in multiply or procedural mode, perhaps in two or three applications, changing resolution or placement, to produce a subtle yet exciting result. One clue to the successful use of a filter or tool, is when it is not extremely obvious to others just what you did. Many tools streamline effects you could create without that tool. I’ll put in an unsolicited plug for Flaming Pear’s Super Blade Pro plug-in. Everything this filter does, you can create other ways. You should learn how to do it without this plug-in, just as one should know how to multiply and divide, even if they use a calculator. But, as time is valuable to most, it is sure great to have a tool that can create fancy beveled shapes within a selection, in a wide variety of surfaces, like metals or glass, with a few adjustments. An excellent resource for learning similar effects, without the use of external plug-ins, is a series of tips by Kai Krause that utilize Photoshop’s calculations feature. These are known as Kai’s Power Tips, and are available on-line. I would be remiss if I did not point out a lesser known, yet equally exciting and useful paint application called Studio Artist, by Synthetik Software. It is similar in some ways to Painter, in that it makes use of the paint-tool metaphors, but it has its own very distinct character, and endless variations to be explored. Many of the default settings are pretty far out, but keep in mind the concept of adjusting to your own taste. You can reign in these effects to suit you. I’d suggest the same procedure of stepping through all the presets, to see what they do, then try tweaking them until you find a set of tools that achieve just what you want. A demo version is available for download on-line. There are tons of tutorials on-line for Photoshop, Painter, and many more applications. A quick search will turn up many. The key issue to this entire piece is to remind the artist that he or she is in charge of their own vision. The artist is not locked into just what comes out of the box. These applications and filters are just a point of departure for the artist to expand upon, and bend and manipulate to one’s own vision. Explore, tweak, and even misuse these tools to create the imagery that speaks to you. |
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