Image via Wikipedia
I still remember fooling around with Coral Draw when I was in school. I was completely in love with it back then. And somewhere in the haze of home works and exams, I lost touch with it. Today, I experienced the same old feeling watching a buddy of mine work on Photoshop. He was explaining how buttons are made: the shading, highlights, brightness gradients etc. And then it hit me: just about every form of creativity is going digital.
What started with expensive 2D animation tools for movies have crossed over to the consumer domain. Be it Photoshop, Avid, Instagram or Windows Live Movie Maker, artists have access to a amazingly powerful set of tools to express their creativity. And its not just images that have gone digital, it’s the entire universe of content including music and writing. And it is not just two dimensions either, I know at least two startups who are working on consumer 3D printing. Just like how engineers moved from the slide-rule to CAD/CAM, future artists would’ve seen the easel only in museums.
So what does it mean to the creative process? One thing for sure: more. The one giant advantage that digital creation offers is the undo button. You no longer have to throw away a perfectly good copy just because you smudged the corner. It allows the artist to be do more. And with all things digital, the artist who knows a little bit of programming would have a natural advantage in this scheme of things. Take a look at Scott Draves: a “software artist.” I ran into to him in SIGGRAPH (a computer graphics conference) where he was presenting digital art when it was still in its infancy. As tools get more powerful and mobile, we are headed towards an exciting convergence between art and computer science.
Hello Mr. Artist, got Python?
