Digital Traditional Painting

What is digital traditional painting? It’s digital painting in a traditional style. This is an important subcategory of digital art (that is, art made primarily by using software on a computer), which differs from other types of digital art in its process of creation and its product.

The characteristic process

Digital traditional painting can be distinguished from some of the other forms of digital art by its process of creation. It is primarily digital way of painting, of making painterly marks with the assistance of computer software. Typically, digital painters make some physical strokes or similar gestures on a receptive surface (usually with a stylus or their fingers, on a drawing tablet or a touch-sensitive screen) with the intention of causing marks to appear on the computer screen. Of course, the exact nature of those marks will be mediated through a software program that the artist guides to some extent.

Sometimes digital collage (the use of software to manipulate and place prior images) is incorporated into digital painting. But the process of digital painting is primarily painting, as described above. It is not primarily allowing a software algorithm to manipulate a single image (as when photo software transforms a photograph into an ‘oil painting’) or to arrange multiple images, either spatially into a collage or temporally into a slide show or video.

The characteristic product

Digital traditional painting, of course, is only one way of painting on a computer. It is distinguished from the other types of digital painting by its product. The product is in a traditional style, such that it appears to be somewhat like paintings produced with material media (such as watercolor paints, gouache, acrylic paints, oil paints, pastels, color pencils, airbrushes, and so on). Therefore, the product is usually judged (in part) according to standards drawn from those traditions of painting.

The process and product of digital traditional painting are closely related: to make their digital products look more traditional, artists may emulate the traditional processes of painting in material media. That’s the key advice Court Jones gives in “How to Make Digital Paintings Look Traditional.” His main tip is to follow the same steps one would in traditional art, especially in the beginning stages of a painting. For instance, when Jones paints a digital oil portrait, he covers the entire canvas with a thin wash of color, makes a gesture line drawing of the subject, and then blocks in major areas of local color or adds some hues to contrast with the final colors. He notes in summary, "The recurring theme here is to try to mimic the procedures of traditional artists, and to limit your digital tools so that they reflect more accurately the limitations of traditional materials. If you do that, your digital work will be more a reflection of you and your skills, rather than the software."

Jones offers several examples of how “to limit your digital tools.” He uses only digital brushes that produce marks with “realistic textures,” paints on just one layer, avoids gimmicky special effects (like perfect gradients for lighting effects), paints over mistakes rather than rely on “Undo,” uses a limited color palette, and doesn’t sample colors from a reference photo. I’ll explore some of these techniques (and possible exceptions) in future posts. For now, I want to endorse Jones’ main idea that emulating traditional painting processes can help the digital artist make art in a traditional style.

Why am I interested in digital traditional painting? The answer is in my next post, “How Being Cheap and Lazy Made me Realistic.”

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Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and that it inspires you to enjoy digital painting. If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends. And please send me your insights on digital painting and suggestions for Digital Paint Spot.

Bob Kruschwitz