How I Work - Digital Art

My digital art may arise from an idea in my mind that has begun to express itself in some visualization or it may begin with one or more images that particularly appeal to me from which an idea for a digital piece forms.

I begin the process by looking through photographs to find various elements of the image I have imagined. Or, with digital art that originates from the visual stimulation of a particular image I've seen, I look for additional visual elements that seem to express an aesthetic connection with the elements already selected.

They may be photos from the collections I've built up over the years, or ones I've taken specifically for the digital art piece I have in my mind. The digital piece will be built up bit by bit from one visual element to the next.

I use Photoshop to digitally "cut out" the parts from each photo that I want to use, put them together and begin to manipulate the shapes, sizes, colors, etc. to create the image. I can even "paint" parts from one section of the image onto another part. The skirt in "Sky Dancer" was created in this way.

For the digital pieces that I create from my own drawings, I use the same methods. The only difference is that the original source images are my drawings rather than photographs. So the completed piece will have the visual effect of a drawing rather than a photograph.

When I first started creating digital art, I would scan the photos I'd been taking for years to use as reference and inspiration for my drawings and woodcuts. Also for decades I had been collecting photos from magazines and newspapers, and buying picture books for reference in creating drawings and woodcuts. So, for my digital art, I began to also scan these photos to use digitally.

But with my first digital camera, the image collection went into overdrive! I could take hundreds of photos in a few hours, of everything in my immediate environment that caught at my aesthetic senses. I began cataloguing them by type as "elements". I have filled two DVDs with them and I'm working on the third.

The figures in my work are most often constructed from body parts collected from multiple sources, including posing my own body parts in the positions I am imagining! I can then cut out the pieces I need and change the color, size, shape and configuration to use in the digital piece I'm constructing.

I find that using the mousepad feels very similar to the use of drawing tools or woodcutting tools. It gives me the same sense of pleasure not only in the visual construction of images, but in the tactile processes as well.