There are so many tools and gadgets for creativity in my dwelling that I don't know where to go first. Should I sit at my table and do drawings and paintings with "conventional" media like ink and watercolor? Or should I turn on SoyMac and the keyboard, and continue exploring the sounds I can get from GarageBand? Or should I turn on Macarios and work with PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator? Or maybe I should choose the word processor and do a blog entry? Well, I guess you've figured out which one I chose just now.

Before this, I was working with my Photoshop Tutorial CD, "Step by Step Instruction to Beginning Coloring in Adobe Photoshop." This CD, created by commercial artist Brian Haberlin, shows me how to take a black and white drawing and add color digitally, just the way every comic book is now produced. So far it seems to be a rather painstaking process, in which you have to hand-trace every shape you want to color. But I know there are technological solutions to these problems. In fact, I have done just such coloring before, in a much easier process, using Painter 9 rather than Photoshop. But right now it is important for me to learn Photoshop.

It is amazing what artists can do with Photoshop. I have finally found Websites and galleries of artists who do digital painting. These are mostly in the commercial field, doing "concept sketches" for films, games, or other entertainments, as well as character, machine, and scenery designs. Some of these artists make work that just blows me away. I spent five months doing my "City of Amber" in acrylic, but look what artist Mike Hernandez has done in Photoshop, whether with a fairy-tale mill or a wild city in the vast ruins and mist. Like almost all the other artists of this type, he lives in California. If you scroll down through his art blog you will see what he does, in his own location, with the same kind of industrial sketching that I love to do.

A while back if I looked at this stuff I'd be depressed and want to throw out my paints but now, all I want to do is sit here at my tablet and computer and do my own versions of this. There are other artists who are just as fantastic. Perhaps the one who most impresses me is Thom Tenery who is trained as an architect as well as an artist. His architectural fantasies make me (figuratively) drool. He also lives in California where he works for the film and videogame industry. Another thing that impresses me about these artists is their dedication to sketching outdoors, known in proper Frenchy art parlance as "plein air" painting. With a twenty-first century twist, they don't take oil paints and a portable easel out to the countryside, they take their laptop and electronic drawing tablet. Amazing, at least until your battery runs out.

There isn't any "plein air" in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and it's disappearing fast in Falls Church, which if you remember was the theme of my show in June. I used to do sketches not in lovely country places but in malls and parking lots and cafe's. Due to time constraints (day job) I have gotten away from this practice, but maybe it's time to get back to doing it. I still do sketches but they are in markers and from memory, which doesn't count as "plein air," since it is really done indoors. Once I get those Photoshop coloring skills, I can take black and white sketches I do of poetic Dumpsters and digging machinery and mall halls and color them in.

As for the more fantasy-oriented work that these artists do so well, I feel some conflict about it. I spent the first twenty years of my professional life doing fantasy art (mostly) but now I feel guilty if I do it. From a "fine arts" or even more lofty "contemporary art" standard, these commercial artists, no matter how dazzling their technique is, are still working for the entertainment industry creating monsters, fantasy worlds, babes, superheroes, and other elements which can only be called kitsch. Presumably "true" artists would not waste their precious talent doing these trivial and unoriginal diversions. They would be engaging with the images and the meaningfulness of the "real" world. Or something like that.

It is interesting to me that so much glorious work is indeed done purely for commercial entertainment. This is of course where the money is, and an artist's gotta make a living. Many centuries ago, it was the Christian Church which sponsored the lavish output of artists. Their work included many of the same fantasy elements which the modern commercial artists use: angelic and demonic beings, fabulous architecture, epic battles, divine epiphanies, apocalyptic explosions. But since they were from the Bible or the lives of the saints, it was OK. Later on, in a more secular age, an artist could still have his fantasy fun with Classical mythology. It is only in our non-mythological age that such figurative fantastic art has been demoted to contemptible childishness. I am so tempted to turn Photoshop back on right now. There are more Imaginal cities waiting to be built.

Posted at 3:20 am | link