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Digital painting

739 artworks, 41 artists
Digital painting is a technique of obtaining an image exclusively through use of computer software imitating traditional artistic tools. Works created using this technique initially exist as a digital file. Pictures in the digital painting style are often demonstrated in digital form, on screens, and are used to illustrate printed publications. They are also included in video projects, projected onto various surfaces, printed on fabric; in a word, they are used wherever a graphic file is required to obtain a drawing. We can say that modern cartoons and computer games are also digital painting.
The first digital paintings were images created using letters, numbers and ASCII characters (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Actually, the first digital “pictures” are attempts to convey emotions in the text: this is how the ancestors of modern emoticons appeared. The next iconic ASCII image was the portrait of Mona Lisa, very popular in print form in the mid-70s. The images of Che Guevara and Jesus were also very popular (the latter as a response to the popular Jesus Christ Superstar rock performance). This was followed by the simplest digital games, where moving pictures also consisted of icons. In the wake of the computer boom, the first graphic editors appeared.
In 1962, American Ivan Sutherland invented Sketchpad, the first graphical interface software to work with a light pen. The developers solved their problems; the creation of a graphical user interface made it possible to simplify the communication between the user and software. At the same time, the development of the creative direction of digital painting began: graphic editors were used for creative purposes.
One of the first large digital art exhibitions took place in London in 1968. The Institute of Contemporary Art presented the Cybernetic Intuition exhibition, where the first digital artists presented their works: Nam June Paik, Frieder Nake, Leslie Mezei, Georg Nees, Michael Knoll, John Whitney. It should be noted that many of them were engineers and scientists who were carried away by the creative aspects of their technical work.
Modern graphic editors are divided into raster, working with pixels, and vector, whose work is based on curves. The most popular raster editor is Adobe Photoshop, vector editors are Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. Each of them has a huge choice of different art tools and their settings. A digital artist has an amazing array of visual possibilities. At the same time, do not forget that you need to learn how to draw to use any artistic tools, both material and digital.
Famous artists who worked with digital art: Nam June Paik, Frieder Nake, Leslie Mezei, Georg Nees, Michael Knoll, John Whitney, Katherine Nash, Scott Draves, Carlos Ginzburg, Jimmy Long.

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