Don't judge by the tools.
Today, I've had the occasion to see someone claim that drawn art made with digital tools is not real art, since it is so much easier than making art with the traditional paper and pencil. As far as I know, quite a few people claim this and I found this quite amusing in a way, because someone who says this is obviously completely missing the point of both art and digital tools (and thus shouldn't write such a thing in the first place).
Now, I'm not much of what people usually call an artist. I do some bits of writing now and then and I stopped dedicating time to drawing a long time ago (not that I was any good at it anyway). Mostly, my time is spent writing software, but I am of the opinion that software development is an art of its own.
First of all, claiming that digital art isn't as good or as difficult as traditional art (practically implying that it isn't worth as much) has the same ring as "back in my days, blah blah, uphill, both ways". Yes, some things were more difficult 10, 20, 40 years ago and are now trivial, but the fact that this is the case allows to achieve more complexity instead of wasting time on things that are now trivial. The difficulty of tasks isn't diminishing. It is simply moving along as we strive to reduce it; by developping better tools. So, comparing digital and traditional art isn't really fair, since they each require a different set of skills. Also, there are quite a few animated movies that are made nowadays; are they automatically bad because they were made that way? People who think digital art isn't art must not appreciate the world much nowadays since there is large amount of digital art visible everywhere.
On the topic of tools, belittling work that has ben made using better tools is not constructive in any way. As the world moves on, we keep making better tools for achieving our tasks and not using them because they make life easier is an argument that I can't qualify as anything else than dumb. Should architects and engineers not use computer assisted design to make better (and safer) building, airplanes, cars, ...? Should doctors not use computer assisted tools for better diagnostics, curing of illnesses? Should software developpers keep using assembler, because modern, higher level languages are too easy to use?
In fact, let me answer this last one: If you lack skills as a programmer, you are going to produce poorly written code no matter the language. The only thing you are going to gain by using better tools is that it may not be as obvious that your code is poorly written and you may even manage to write something according to specifications. But anyone looking at it with a bit of experience will be able to tell it was a poor job. In the same way, an artist who doesn't know the basics won't do a very goood job, regardless of the medium.
Now, a good programmer will be able to get something good, regardless of the tools. Obviously, some tools will make the job harder than others, if they are not well suited to the issue at hand, but that is about it. But this doesn't mean either that "easier", higher level languages are automatically making things easier either. For some tasks, it is still suitable to use the older, more primitive languages, such as assembler. The best choice depends on the kind of result you aim to obtain!
Which brings us back to the subject of drawing: traditional art and digital art are two largely different things and they look quite different too. Both have some things that the other doesn't have. Traditional art can't provide the colorfulness or the level of detail of digital art. Digital art can be done without the use of paper at all (environment friendly). Traditional art however allows the use of coloring techniques specific to the medium. And traditional art has the advantage that you produce one original, which practically can't be perfectly reproduced afterwards. I'm sure there are many other advantages and inconvenients of both, but my knowledge is too limited to get further. In any case, good digital art requires work just as much as good traditional art. How much work depends on how skilled one is with the tools.
The next step is, speaking about art itself. I won't attempt to define art here, since there is practically no way to get an agreement on it, but in general, art is about expressing something through a medium. Some medium are more suited for expressing some kind of things, but it seems obvious that having the idea that a medium can decide whether something is art or not is quite missing the point of art. People find new way to express themselves all the time and there is no reason toclaim that a certain way is automatically wrong. What is important is that the end result is good or somehow meaningful.
To conclude, my impression is that people who claim that digital art isn't art have little clue about what they are saying and it is likely that they themselves have never attempted drawing using digital tools. Also, it seems to me like it might be caused by some kind of jealousy towards the quality of the work achieved by digital artists that they themselves can't achieve with traditional art. Or perhaps they can't afford to buy a tablet, who knows...
Posted on the 11-03-2012 23:27