[selchie]

Digital art is considered another artisitic medium. Some consider digital manipulation a new technique for photography, but others want to keep the digital darkroom separate from the traditional. It can use photography, but doesn't have to. In the class I took, many people created lovely pieces that were completely created in the digital sphere. From what I hear, many of the new cartoons are created completely on the computer. You can also add scanned elements, as I did with New Zealand Souvenir.

I use Photoshop (PS), though there are other programs which one could use. A digital photo processing program can be used for basic adjustments, but you couldn't do a lot of what I was able to do. Some digital cameras come with Photoshop Elements, which is a pared-down version of PS, and I've heard is quite nice. PS is really expensive, so I'd recommend playing with PS Elements first.

I do a lot of layer work, where I can get each layer to interact with the others so I (hopefully) get the results I want. It's tough to describe if you're not familiar with the program. That's why I took a class. Now I glean info from magazines & websites for hints on how to do things better, or to get new effects.

Ancestral Signs is composed of only two photos. In essence, I cut windows out of the manzanita where the bark had peeled back. Then I laid it over the pictographs, to make them look like they were carved there. Between these I added a semi-transparent grayscale layer of the manzanita so that the pictograph layer had some shadowing and texture to make it look like it belonged. Otherwise, it would have been rather flat-looking on a curved surface.

Eerie/spooky was the effect I was after with The Barrow World. It started with a simple technique I learned in class, and I built into that result.

I hope that helped. I'd blither on about digital art even more, but I think that for now I've gone on long enough.