My Latest Digital Abstracts

It's all you Robert! The software can't do anything on it's own. :-)

I'm sure painters in the olden days felt the same way when they learned that it was no longer necessary to grind rocks and mix chemicals to make your paints, when you could just go to a store and buy ready-made paint.

Hummph! That's not REAL painting.

And then along came acrylics! OMG!!!

With what I'm doing in digital art, it's easier to be prolific. There is little check on physical exertion, endurance, and it's easier to create a huge body of work that takes up almost no physical space [now I can create hundreds and hundreds of useless visuals, whereas, in earlier days, I was limited by the physical media]. Making a visual statement doesn't take as much time. There is less pulling of hair, cursing, slamming paintbrushes against the wall, lost sleep due to obsessively long sessions. Hummmph! -- that's not REAL art. REAL artists toil, take time to feel every instant with their muscles and mind, go on raging drunks, cut off ears, and do crazy stuff to their bodies.

Even though I make this stuff, I could understand the sentiment towards traditional media, by traditional-media artists. As I've said before, during my dancer days, I considered ALL visual artists, even painters, a step below performing artists. When you are in that zone, in that state of youth, in that state of health, this sentiment makes sense.

I drink some commercially produced lemonades, but I really prefer what I painstakingly squeeze and mix myself from fresh lemons. I can't quite say the same for my original paintings -- I actually like the visual appeal of the faster digital stuff better. Yes, I have sold out. (^_^) ... I loathe myself -- hey, maybe the self-loathing makes me a REAL artist, after all.

With the digital abstracts, if I were vigilant enough, took exact notes of every step that I performed, then I could communicate to ANYBODY how to create the exact same images -- I mean EXACTLY ... by ANYBODY. I could never have done this with my traditional-media paintings. In fact, this would have been an impossibility. This impossibility would seem to make the traditional-media paintings something more unique. Even so, I still prefer the visual appeal of my digital stuff over my original stuff.

Robert, I switched from traditional mediums to digital and felt the same way. I got over it because I found it fun, and when I found they sell it was more fun.

I realize some people will buy nothing but an oil painting and consider it the only art there is but so what? I like the one that looks like water best of the three and see no reason why it wouldn't sell. Someone will see it and think that will go perfect wherever they think it will go. When I sell a piece I love it because I know someone actually liked it and isn't purchasing it because I am famous and it may appreciate in value.

just my random thoughts.

Robert,

People take photographs all day long of their dog. No one says, this was not art. Photos are not really questioned any longer. They were 80 years ago I am sure.

Chuck,

I avoid acrylics!!!! Those people make me worry.

Dave Bridburg
https://Bridburg.com

Robert, never fear, get rid of the guilt. I'm mostly a photographer. I really felt like I was selling out the first few times I saved a badly developed-scanned photo by putting a filter on it with Topaz or a watercolor filter in Photoshop. Now, even though I still prefer "straight" photography (although it's absolutely almost always tweaked for lighting and color and straightened and maybe a distracting element edited out), I've started growing a little fonder of the ones I've saved by "cheating".

It's all art. We just need to get out of our own way and do what we want or need to do to get an image we like. GO FOR IT.

Oh, I do "go for it", Mary B. I'm just reflecting on the process.

As I said, if I kept precise notes on my efforts, then I could communicate to anybody how to reproduce one of these images exactly. It would be like a recipe that would ALWAYS produce the same result, no matter who executed it.

Now this raises an interesting question: "Are those written-down steps of the recipe the real artwork?" This poses a dilemma too, because recipes are not copyright protected.

Val A,

I'm not really in turmoil about this. I was merely reflecting on things. I wouldn't be making these images, if I had any serious reservations. They ARE fun, ... lots more fun than what I used to do, which I never regarded as fun -- fulfilling, yes, but not fun to actually make -- fun to see finished, but never fun to bring into existence. But these things are even fun to bring into existence, by comparison.

For example, I just finished this one:



These are still somewhat general directions for my specific software, but I could refine this recipe to be exact for anyone to follow:

Open image A

invert color

scale image, unlock proportions, and set as a square

adjust color balance -- midtones towards blue (23)

adjust color balance -- highlights towards yellow (-24)

map image to sphere as separate layer with transparent background, using color #ffffe0 as the directional-light color at 30% opacity to tone down the light point reflection

apply distort filter, "polar coordinates", "to polar"

repeat applying the same distort filter to entire resulting image

adjust color balance, midtones towards red (26)

adjust color balance, shadows towards green (12)

adjust color balance, highlights towards cyan (-9) and blue (14)

Open image B -- as layer, and adjust position to appear as a vase

apply auto color enhance

apply map illusion filter (divisions 1, mode 2)

apply bump map inverted

repeat bump map inverted

apply HSV noise filter - holdness 2, hue 3, saturation 37, value 37

invert colors

adjust color curves (x 30, y 0)

And I do not know all these steps in advance. I fiddle around to discover them. The fiddling and discovering are parts of the process, but the recipe DOES end up being exactly repeatable by anyone.

That is cool Robert! Beats the heck out of being outside in the smelting hot sun. :-)

Mario,

It's 90 degrees here -- I bet hotter where you are. Great for growing watermelons and pumpkins. Not so great for hyper puppies and humans who need to be outside training them.

I did that last image this morning -- probably took me a little over an hour, figuring it out, fiddling with it, or, as I call it, "monkeying around" [you know, like a monkey placed before a keyboard].

I have no idea what I'm doing -- I just do it, and create the ideas and explanations of what I have done afterwards. Ideas and directions can get in the way sometimes. Directions, methods, and techniques become subject to discussion, only after the physical efforts, trials, mistakes, successes, failures leading to those directions occurs.

Precision requires chaos as a foundation.

One more for now (I've been doing about one a day for the last few days):

David, I still love Acrylics paintings and finishing the product with digital for a better images, To-Tam

Most painters would be completely lost in Photoshop and wouldn't have the first clue how to recreate their own work in it. If it's easy, that's because you put the time and effort into making it easy or at least making it 'look' easy.

Copy / Pasted:
The story goes that Picasso was sitting in a Paris café when an admirer approached and asked if he would do a quick sketch on a paper napkin. Picasso politely agreed, swiftly executed the work, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a rather significant amount of money. The admirer was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you a minute to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years”

Once you get the hang of monkeying around with the features, really, these are much easier than painting.

My latest (Kooky Abstract) applied to a tote bag:

I love the tote bag. We need more unique tote bags out there in the grocery stores. When I shop with my own, I get compliments.
As for the process and recipe, I think anyone following a recipe like that would veer off and not make it to the end without just going to their own ideas. If you found a formula that sells, would you stick to it exactly? I guess I would, if it sells. Then I would do some others for fun.

Nice one Robert!

To-Tam,

By 'worried'......I am kidding.

When I was producing, I was more concerned with making a unified body of work. The particular media was less important to me.

The reasons for me to work digitally were the new levels of abstraction.

Dave Bridburg
https://Bridburg.com

So, I guess I'm on a roll in this one-a-day thing. For somebody who likes really abstract representations, this stretch of imagination (my latest -- Playing The Piano) might do nicely for an iPhone case:

Love that too. Keep it going. I've probably done five or six in a row, one a day (still learning some basics), but I will be dropping down to one or two a week. I enjoy the process a lot.

Robert, You are on a roll! Your images are awesome!

I am a digital painter but what you are doing is way above my skill set, I use brushes and paint … beyond that I am lost. Anyway I thought it would be fun to try something new on this hot day and above you said about following directions.

The thing that has me stumped is the opening of the image itself. You say open image A. For your creations what image did you start with? or do you just start with a blank canvas and all those directions create the image?

Val A,

What I am doing here starts as a public domain image -- any old image almost will do (or maybe not). I look for high resolution images with interesting colors (sometimes muted), and then I just start playing around with colors, filters, distortions, until either I realize that all the time I have spent on it results in a failure or a success. I have done three failures in a row before. Sometimes nothing I do on a given image seems to work, and I end up trashing all those minutes I spent trying. Most times, though, I seem to arrive at something tolerable, interesting, and highly adaptable to all products, except not usually large enough for "tapestries".

So, I am not a REAL artist here, I guess. (^_^) I am parasitizing other people's images (public domain, remember) and distorting them so much that they are completely transformed and lost in the new creation.

Okay, now you know my secret. Give me an image -- any old image -- and I'll make something interesting out of it.

Robert, Thank you! You make it sound easy and fun!

I take a lot of photos that I don't know what to do with. I tend to over work many and thought them unusable but perhaps you have offered a solution. IF I can get the hang of it.

Val A,

I think that there is a deep truth here, and I'm not quite sure how to verbalize it.

What is it about a realistic representation that makes it so suitable as a foundation to destroy into this sort of abstraction? The perfection of technological filters somehow makes perfect destruction of reality possible. This is why a person could question whether he/she is the artist or whether the software is the artist, where the operator of the software is just a monkey at a keyboard. (^_^)

In these things, I am hardly more than an advanced monkey. I test a movement, and if the movement produces a favorable result, then I might repeat it consistently -- like a dog learning a new behavior, I guess.

... and another:

"I still prefer the visual appeal of my digital stuff over my original stuff."- Robert K.

Man Robert, I can really relate with that! It must be the freakin heat outside working on original artworks and sculptures, I'm with you on this. In fact just got my new domain up https://marioartprints.com up on shopify ans I'm planning on selling my FAA gallery items there. It's so much easier making a printHere using software then trying to get a good image of my sculptures or paintings.

It's all under construction right now but I'm running it live to test some stuff.

Here is one I did and the image size is large and I'm just wowed! I know this is not an image thread but this one I wanted you to see.

I am gonna be the dissenter here, in that if you can create something with a single click of a button - say applying an effect to a picture - you shouldn't be uploading it - unless you were also the author of the image that you originally altered.

If you altered some image off the net with say an app that makes your image look like a painting, or those ones where you see it's of tigers but the lines are all twisty, imo, it's cheap, and it kinda kicks the people who actually spent the time to do their own painting of their own work in the face. Just my 2 cents. All my images are my own.

That being said, if you can distort it enough where it is virtually unrecognizable from the original and looks like it's own unique piece of art, then go for it.

Also david, some people still do - some sites still do not allow any photography on their art submission sites, like deviantart, because in their eyes it is not the medium of art which to them is some form of ink you manually drew and coloured, and is instead photogaphy, which they see under an artistic umbrella, but not what in their mind traditionally defines art to them. I personally am an artist over a photographer, and I originally felt a bit insulted when people would compare the 2 in terms of time and craftsmanship - I've learned to relax my opinion though and just see it as an other form of expression.

So that bias still exists.

----Shawn----
shawndall.com

Shawn D,

I hear you. I get it, and I take no offense to your point of view, because I've been there, ... in an even more discriminating way than you.

In my dancer days, I considered painters or any visual artist working in traditional drawing media lesser artists than the artists who used their bodies and made no lasting artifacts.

In those days, the medium was time and space, in the moment, in the unique momentary experience of the viewer. When a dance performance was done, the art was done, gone in that moment, never to appear again in that exact way. In those days, I considered art something that could not be hung on a wall or contemplated viscerally after the fact of its immediate performance. Painters, in my view, then, were scab collectors, obsessed with material residue that was dead.

Obviously (^_^), my outlook changed. Again, the mortality thing places gradations of value on the intensities of our struggles to bring things into the world. When you are young, you have more time to struggle. When you are older, less. I've done dance, acting, drawing, painting, poetry, photography, and they each have their unique character of struggle.
It's not a matter of one's being better or more authentic than another. Rather, it's that one has a greater intensity factor than another.

If the end effect of capturing the eye is a wow effect, then this is the determining factor of the art's value, in the end. The audience or viewer who experiences this wow effect is who says whether it is worthy or not.

Okay, that was a lot more than two cents worth.

Me too. I mean my views changed on this subject as well when I began questioning what really is original? What really is new under the sun? The continuum of the realms.

Shawn,

No one ever has a kick in the face. People simply do different things.

I think you are addressing me.

I do not take Deviantart seriously. That is not a kick in your face. It is just my opinion of DA. We are both allowed to freely have opinions.

People in this thread are making derivative art often. I am all for that. Trying to generalize like in this conversation, I can not follow that. It makes no sense. And we are not allowed to name and shame anyone, so no point in getting upset for any of us.

When someone takes DA seriously, good for them. I say that because I respect all artists looking for an outlet. No matter what it is. I respect the artist. What I think of the outlet or the art is my business. I keep that generally to myself. Unless asked. Or unless the topic in private is getting more sales.

I am not in this thread to ask for a pity party over how people take each of us. So I will try to bow out. I may respond if my name is brought up, but this is not a topic for me.

Dave Bridburg
https://Bridburg.com

Robert what I am really liking about this new medium which you to have embraced is that it's much like "fluidity", it also has a mind of it's own and the results are at time as unpredictable as in drip painting. The difference is, that it has a built in instant gratification element and that unlike fluidity or drip painting you can take it back once it's painted. :-)

I just realized, Mario and David, that my last few comments should have been in Mario's "Derivative Art" thread. Oh well, they are so similar that I suppose it's okay to continue here.

Yes, this is about derivative art, and my latest abstracts can range anywhere from a noticeable modification of somebody else's base work to a complete transformation that totally looses the integrity of the original work, BUT discovers a new integrity BECAUSE of the original work.

Really, it's a sort of collaboration, dependent on the work of multiple artists. It's just that one artist decides to make it so, namely the transforming artist.

Now, from an art viewer's perspective, or from an art consumer's perspective, often they just don't give a ___ about how hard you worked on it or how much visceral, hand-eye skill you might have in making it. All they care about is what impact the visual work has on their consciousness.

So, maybe I make eye candy these days. I don't really claim to do otherwise. Candy is good. I've done the other stuff in earlier years. Now I'm into candy. (^_^) ... I guess. I just don't have it in me to do the physical sort of art that I used to.

What I do, even in a transformation, can take hours, because I am sitting here, obsessing on line thickness, say, which I can now change in a snap, but I might have to go through a dozen trials to find the right thickness. Or the right color. Or the right filter. Or the right position on the page. You can spend many minutes fiddling with these basic things to get them perfect in a digital creation, whereas, in a painting, great effort would be required to draw a line in a different place, or change the position of a figure.

and then there are some very powerful software programs which do all that for you while you still have tons of control over telling it what you want to do, the difference is more candy faster than you can eat it. Lol!

Here's one I spent hours making today, which I did not think would get to an acceptable place for me. I kept plugging away, though, and just when I thought it didn't amount to much, I closed it out, came back about an hour later, applied one more filter, and blam, there was an acceptable result. But I didn't stop there -- somehow bubbles called to me, and so I had to find some bubbles, and spend more minutes going through trials and errors to place the bubbles or orient the bubbles most appropriately:



Candy!