Q:Maestro: In your blog captions and in your books you often describe the media you use; paints, airbrush and so on. Have you considered digital painting?

onionvolcano

Digital work only yields a printed output, but I like to have something I can touch and mess around with. In addition, I honestly don’t feel I could do competent digital painting without taking a class in Painter [or whatever other program people are currently using], and I haven’t put aside the time to do so.

That being said, I have done digital artwork on numerous occasions, usually for CD album covers. My cover for Sepultura’s ROOTS CD was done entirely digitally, as were some other things I did for them and Max Cavalera’s band SOULFLY. A piece I did for a CD single [but which the record company never used] won a gold medal in 1996 in the annual Society of Illustrators show…the first digital work awarded a gold medal. I’m proud of that, though I’d liked to have won an award for my regular “analog” painting as well;-)

Photoshop is the only digital painting program I am familiar with and use regularly.

I use digital technology all the time to facilitate my workflow, by generating comp layouts, architectural or perspective grids, and stuff like that.

I had several shelves of National Geographic magazines, as well as five large file cabinets full of reference photos, none of which I need to use any more: it has been supplanted by a hard drive full of scanned photos.

MW

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  1. theartofmichaelwhelan posted this