Working Digitally

In this process of getting myself set up for selling prints, I've had occasion to do a good bit of thinking about the medium choice I'm making: digital. Obviously, the end product isn't a digital product, as much as someone who makes serigraphs doesn't sell their screen, I don't sell my digital file or a .jpg, but am going sell the prints I have made from them. Still, the choice of digital is one that brings along it's own set of advantages and disadvantages.

One of the things I enjoy most about the digital creation of art is the flexibility it allows me. In much less time than it would take me to do the same with a physical work, I can copy something at any stage and go different directions with it. It lowers the threshold of exploration for me. I can change parts of it easily (as simple as turning layers on or off), I can change colors easily, and I can resize things easily. Working with vector images, as I prefer to, scaling does not mean I lose detail, and in fact sometimes it's advantageous for me to make a small detail in a larger scale and size it down to fit with the rest of what I have. Digital work seems to fit the way I think, and provides me with instant gratification.

Working with a physical medium such as acrylic paint allows me far less immediate flexibility (though the fast drying times do make for less demand on my patience), but it does force me, at times, to commit to a direction rather than too-quickly go elsewhere with it. That can lead to discovery, too. It is discovery that takes me longer, in general, but it tends to take me in different directions than working on my screen does.

Painting with acrylics takes me far longer. I know this, because one of the images I've created digitally is based off the same concept I initially made in acrylic. The painting took far longer, and has me far less satisfied with the quality of the result. (Clean brush, clean medium, clean water, and yet small dusty things get in my gloss coating as if magnetically drawn to it from across the room.) The painting feels weightier, because it is, and the finish and feel of it is different (though the colors are, too); the shine, the strokes, the more immediate link to the act of creation that the result has: these make a painting have a presence that is different than that of a digital print.

Of course, now I am (still!) dealing with the color management issues that working digitally brings with it. When I'm working, the colors are seen in the context of my room, on my monitor, in the medium of light. The finished product isn't light on a monitor, but ink on paper, and matching those together is a profession on its own. Calibrating my monitor so I can print things out correctly is taking up no small amount of resources, and while I hope that once I've come to a result that I'm happy with the greatest part of the work will be done, it is apparently a task that does have to be done again and again over the life of a monitor.

Those are just some of the issues with the creation of a piece. There is more that comes into play when you think about stepping into the world of selling a digital print. I'll write about that, soon!