Interview with VisualArts 2011

Here's the original transcript of an interview I did earlier this year with Visual Arts Illustrated
 

-when did you first realize that art could be your life, or that it would become a big part of it?

My story is quite different to a lot of artists. Although I have always been a daydreamer, I am not a naturally gifted artist. In fact, growing up I was hyperactive and quite aggressive, always fighting, breaking things and getting into trouble. I always admired and envied my friends who had a talent for art and wished I had such an outlet, but I found it very difficult to focus on quiet activities like drawing or painting. Most of the sketching I did at school was in the margins of essays, on desks or the cover of my books, and usually involved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Any serious attempt I made at drawing turned out disproportionate and flat. It was so frustrating having a head full of incredible thoughts and ideas, but having no means to express them and never being taken seriously by people.

In 1990 my whole life changed, however, when my parents bought me my Amiga 500. Once the novelty of gaming wore thin, I found myself spending a lot of time in front of Deluxe Paint, which came bundled with the computer. It was very primitive compared to the painting applications of today (similar to MS Paint) and painting with a mouse was a real challenge, but there was no need to mix paint, stretch canvas or prepare a workspace before I could begin; I’d just push in a disk and I was ready to go. I started out making a lot of violent sketches and animations. They were all quite crude, but I found it really engaging and fun. What’s more, it was a way to release my pent up aggression and express it in a constructive way. I then moved on to copying characters from comics and fantasy book covers just for the challenge it posed. Before long I found myself paying attention in my art classes at school and talking to my teacher about various styles and painting techniques. She loaned me magazines and books from her collection and I studied many different artists from Leonardo Da Vinci to H.R Giger. I carefully examined their choice of colour and composition, their strokes and stippling styles and wondered how I could replicate them using pixels. I learned various tricks to help overcome my difficulties with proportion, including the use of grids and anatomical guides. I alternated between drawing on my computer and with a pencil and would practice by sketching celebrity portraits from magazines, each time trying to add more detail and more realism to my work. I started to get quite good and my grades were getting higher with each piece I submitted. I was also finding myself acting less aggressive and disruptive, and generally less frustrated with the world. 

A couple of years later, I discovered a community of computer enthusiasts known as “the demo scene” where some of the best computer artists in the world would show off their work in software presentations or take part in organised competitions. It was like a form of graffiti, but instead of tagging public walls for an unappreciative audience, you would copy your picture or logo to a disk and spread it to admiring onlookers around the globe. It was my chance to express myself and make my mark on the world. I had never felt so passionate about anything in my life and I realised then that I wanted to be a digital artist.  

-did you study art? or did you take courses?

After leaving school, I went on to take various art classes to try and further my formal education, but they never caught my interest. They comprised a lot of history and academic work, while the practical side of the classes usually involved painting bowls of fruit or making ugly collages from crisp packets, pipe cleaners and other junk. I wasn’t interested in that; I wanted to learn how to paint hot women, fantasy landscapes or scary monsters.

I would say I’m entirely self-taught and have learned most effectively by studying the work of other artists and copying from photos. I have been criticised for doing this, but I believe it’s a great way to master painting techniques, the tools and the technical skills of art.

-has it always been digital art?

I have a deep admiration for traditional art, but it was digital art that truly roused my enthusiasm. I’ve always loved the idea of sharing my work with friends and belonging to a community of likeminded artists, which is something I never found with traditional work.

Another reason I favour digital art is that it generally has fewer pretentious critics, and there’s less of the intellectual elitism that’s so prevalent in the art world of today. A digital artist can paint a vampire, a car or a dragon just because they’re cool, and can be appreciated for it, without needing to justify its artistic significance. Although I do enjoy delving into a piece of art and interpreting its meaning, or creating my own work that tells a story, sometimes art should just be fun.

-what fascinates you about digital painting?

I feel that digital art opens a lot of possibilities that aren’t available to traditional artists. Tools and filters allow you to enhance your work, manipulate the shape and change the colour at any stage in the painting process. One of the biggest benefits, for me, is the ability to detail your work in greyscale and focus on the values, and then mix and apply the colour later.

More importantly, you can make mistakes, experiment more and take chances, because you have the ability to undo or even return to a previous save file. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about the cost of paint or canvas, so you can just keep painting for as long as you want. All these factors give digital painters a lot more freedom to play and discover new approaches and styles.

Another thing I’ve always liked about digital art are the communities and forums, and the ease at which you can get feedback or recognition for your work, whatever your level of expertise.

-you use Photoshop CS5. We just got it installed on our computer, so please tell us what you think about it. Where are the improvements,  which features do you like best, which one would you like to have changed.

I upgraded to Photoshop CS5 not long after it was released and it’s been the first version that has really impressed me since CS2. Although the Opengl features such as scrubby zoom and canvas rotate were available before now, they feel much smoother and faster in CS5. I also like the new context fill tool and the spot healing tool. They’re not perfect, but are very powerful features. The new mixer brushes are an impressive addition too, and I would like to attempt a painting with them some time soon. As minor as it may seem, the most useful tweak for me is the ability to turn pen pressure features on and off by simply clicking an icon at the top of your workspace, instead of going into the brush presets. This has saved me so much time and makes these options far more obvious to those who are new to Photoshop.

On the negative side, I find CS5 performs very slowly compared to CS2, and unless you have a really powerful computer, painting at high resolutions, with multiple layers or with large brushes can be very laggy. What’s more, I still prefer the general layout of CS2. CS5’s docking windows are a nice idea in theory, but many of the tabs take up too much space when they expand. More annoying is the fact that they don’t cascade and even when you minimize them, instead of dropping to the bottom of your desktop and out of sight, they turn into onscreen icons that you have to manually move out of your way. However, if you have a powerful system and a graphics card that can handle the Opengl features, I would say CS5 is a very worthwhile upgrade.

 

-what system are you working on?

I am using a Windows based PC with dual core CPU and a Nvidia Geforce 9800gtx graphics card. I’ve just recently upgraded to Windows 7 64bit from XP, but haven’t noticed any improvement over the 32bit version Photoshop running on XP. My painting tablet is an old and battered Graphire 4, about as low end as they come. It’s all I can afford right now, but it serves its purpose and has lasted well.

-do you think that at one point the traditional technique in commercial illustration will disappear?

I don’t think it will disappear completely as there will always be traditional artists who can offer something different or exceptional. However, I do believe that it will become very rare in the near future and will definitely fade out of mainstream production. 

I find this very sad as digital art is too often used in commercial production as a shortcut rather than an improvement. As a result, I see a lot of commercial illustration that looks cheap and lacks any character.

-we saw that you have some progress videos/ speedpaintings on youtube. What did you do them for? Is it a way to promote yourself?

I find a lot of interest in my work comes from my videos. In my early days I was often accused of painting over photos and cheating to win competitions. Even my progress stills weren’t enough to convince some people my work was all painted from scratch, but when they see a video of me painting the whole thing on a blank canvas, it leaves no room for doubt. Now that people know I’m legitimate, it seems to give them a new level of appreciation for my work. People also find it entertaining to watch the videos and see how the painting develops, so instead of them just looking at a picture for a few seconds and turning away, it’s a way of prolonging their interest for several minutes.

I would love to record the process of all of my paintings to video, but it’s a lot more difficult than it first seems. Usually when I paint, I take my time, experiment with different ideas, correct mistakes or I go back and retouch areas I’m unhappy with. When your process is being recorded, however, you really need to know exactly where you’re going and how to get there.

-is this your proferssion, so do you work as an illustrator?

I have worked for various companies in the past, but I took a change of direction some years ago and went to university to study English. I barely painted anything for 5 years and by the time I came back to it a lot had changed. 99% of digital artists were painting with tablets, whereas I had never even used one. Most of my paintings had been done on a 640x480 pixel canvass or less, yet I could see many artists were working up to 5000x5000 and above. Add this to the fact that I’d been out of practice for 5 years and I felt like a humble beginner and a little out of my league. Unfortunately, I found it really difficult to get back in the industry from that point. Nonetheless, I set up my own website and started working for myself, painting commission pieces for people, freelancing for companies and selling training DVDs.

I’d really like to branch out into concept art, matte painting or texture painting for game and movie projects in the near future, but I need to gain more field experience first.

-who are your clients, what's your field of work?

I have worked for various clients on different projects. I worked on a few 2d game projects back in my Amiga days, designed logos, flyers and that sort of thing. I reviewed book proposals for Focal Press and did some work repainting and touching up Disney movie stills to be sold as official collectible prints. I also did some matte painting and compositing for a short movie last year, which I really enjoyed. These days my clients consist mostly of individuals who want portraits of themselves, their pets or their family members.

Otherwise, I just enjoy making tutorials and helping beginners learn the basics of Photoshop and digital painting. I don’t make money from them, but I have a couple of DVDs I sell and have more in production at this moment. 

-you sell tutorial DVD. Please tell us about this. –

I got the idea to produce my tutorial DVDs when I saw how popular my written tutorials and youtube videos were proving to be. I had been looking for ways to cover my hosting and internet costs, and so I decided to try my hand at making a couple of full DVDs. More importantly, it would allow me to go into much greater detail than I’d ever done before.

I spent a lot of time looking at existing digital art tutorials and DVDs for inspiration, and though many of them ended with impressive results, I found most were hard to follow and left a lot of questions unanswered. They seemed more focused on showing off the skills of the artist and baffling people with art-school theory, than actually teaching beginners how to paint and what tools to use. Many of them were very expensive too and well out of the price range of most casual painters.

I set out to make my DVDs more affordable and beginner-friendly than the ones I’d seen. I find it really fulfilling to hear from people who have learned new skills or found inspiration from my tutorials and that’s been a driving force behind these projects. I want people who follow them to understand that they don’t need years of formal education or a genetic gift to enjoy painting and to be good at it. I’m not competitive when it comes to digital art, so if my students can take my tutorials to the next level and go on to become better than me (and I would say some have) I get a kick from that.

I have more DVDs due throughout 2011 including one focused on male portraits, character design and perhaps an introduction to matte painting.

I couldn't really find a "line" in your artwork ... like PinUp, or technical, or fantasy. It seems you like to do a little bit of everything? Or is there a subject which interests you most?

I don’t think I have ever truly found my niche when it comes to painting. For many years I have tried a lot of different subjects, trying to find what I enjoy most and what I do best. Although I favour portraits above all else, I don’t want to limit myself. Sometimes I’ll see a landscape, get an idea or just feel a certain mood which I want to try and convey. I have also attempted fantasy and sci-fi paintings, but not with much success. I love looking at such work, but I don’t watch movies or read books of these genres so I really lack the inspiration and knowledge to draw from.

I think it’s important for an artist to truly know his/her subject and genre. I have always preferred thrillers and horror fiction over fantasy, so a lot of my work has a macabre element. In complete contrast, I love fashion and fitness and have a real weakness for beautiful ladies, so this is another common theme in my work. Ideally, I want to try and move more towards creepy character portraits and caricatures. After many years trying all things, I believe that’s where I will find my niche.

-we found some images that have been painted on an Amiga. So that must have been quite some time ago. If you compare those "old" times with today .. what has changed, where are the biggest differences .. and where do you think will we be in another 10 years?

I laid down my first pixels on my Amiga at the age of 14. Digital painting was a completely different artform at that time, and nothing like painting at all – more like building a giant mosaic. Artists (or pixellers as they were known) would use a mouse to construct pictures from pixels. It posed a lot of technical challenges, not least because of the limited colour palettes. It’s hard to imagine painting with just 16 or 32 colours now, with no blending or anti-aliasing, but this was all done manually and we would devise different dithering techniques to create the illusion of more colours and values. There were no tutorials back then either and most artists were very secretive about their techniques, so on the whole, digital art was much more difficult in those times. For those willing to put in the effort, however, there was a lot of satisfaction knowing you had a skill that only a limited number of people could master, and if you were good, getting noticed was easy and you could practically walk into a prosperous career in video games.

Nowadays, technology has made digital painting a lot easier and more “user friendly”, which is great for new artists or casual painters looking to express their creativity. Even those with little understanding of computers can pick up a stylus and start sketching, and there are countless tutorials out there to help. The negative side of this development is that digital art communities are getting oversaturated and it’s becoming more difficult to get noticed, and even harder to make a living from it.

As for the future, I predict that digital painting will get easier and will appeal to more people. With touch screen technology on the rise, it will be common practice to paint directly onto a screen and Wacom Cintiqs and such tablets will become affordable to more people. Now that Photoshop has 3d capabilities I also expect we will soon have integrated 3d guides and anatomical models, which can be placed into a scene and painted over. It’s possible we may even start to see applications or filters that can detect and rectify proportion faults and colour inconsistencies. As technology simplifies digital painting, it will become much harder to be recognised and artists will have to start relying more on originality and creativity in order to stand out.