I like to name things. I will name anything so that I can manage it better. I would rather call something by a name than by just some combination of letters and numbers. When it came to Photoshop, I had to name something or just stop using it out of confusion.

Photoshop when used for artistic purposes has many different color and text application tools, all of them used to manipulate the image on the screen. There is no paint or water involved, just pixels and electronic effects. The tools, however, are still called "brushes" by Photoshop and its users, as if they actually were applying real paint. But the real medium in Photoshop is a universal electronic manipulatable substance. It's as if all the delicious varieties of gourmet food you ate were really all simulated from tofu. Photoshop "brushes" attempt to put this electronic tofu into artificial paintings.

The program came with plenty of pre-set brushes, and I've downloaded or created many more. The pre-sets came with descriptive names that claimed to approximate a brushstroke or mark made by a "real" medium, such as oil paint, charcoal, watercolor, pencil, or airbrush. They didn't really "paint," though, since even an electronic tablet and stylus has little tactile resemblance to a real paintbrush. But if you looked at the marks the stylus conveyed to the screen, you might, with enough imagination, see a brushstroke or a pen line.

What was totally different was that, since you were really painting with universal electronic tofu, you could put any medium together with any other one, regardless of whether they could possibly go together in the "real" art world. In Photoshop, you can paint an "oil paint" background and then draw over it in "charcoal" or spray it with "airbrush." Colors that would never cover over anything in the "real" world, such as yellow or pale green, can slice right into your composition without any use of underpainting or building up layers of goo. Any texture, any level of opaqueness, is there for you to use.

As a traditional artist who has worked with traditional media all my life, I confess to feeling a kind of melancholy as I explored Photoshop's endless library of "brushes" and special effects. It is the kind of melancholy that you might feel if you received, like the legendary Chinese emperor, a jeweled mechanical nightingale which sang perfect songs, so much richer than the real one that you would be tempted to forget about the real bird. I can change from "colored pencil" to "airbrush" in a second, and then to "oil paint," even though in the studio this would take hours of arranging, if it were even possible at all.

But I want to continue using Photoshop. How could I solve this peculiar problem? I received inspiration from my facility with naming things. Since I know that digital art is really all one medium, not anything made of chemicals, pigments, and organic extracts, why would the "brushes" have to refer to anything from the old traditional ways? It was possible to extract from the artificial brush the essence of its effect, eliminating the dismaying description. Therefore "charcoal" became "Rough Texture," and "oil pastel" became "mushy irregular stroke." "Pastel" and "chalk" became "Granular Textures," and "spatter" became "Fractal Bits." I made Photoshop usable to me by de-naturing it. There are no brushes there, nor bits of charcoal or erasers or jars of murky water or paint slime on the palette. Ultimately it has no name at all. It is just ones and zeros. But do I still long for the real bird's song?

Posted at 3:03 am | link