One of the things we learned when we moved from the U.S. to Taiwan was that artwork can take up a lot of space. While it's nice to see the final pictures in real life, after awhile, all that energy is just stored in boxes unless it's up on someone's wall. We were blessed to have Rex Klein who has an art gallery in his insurance office in Turlock who was willing to store almost all of my unsold and un-exhibited art in his offices. He has several pieces out at a time, rotating as he chooses, but most of it is in a couple of large boxes in his storage area. Five other pieces hang in the First Street Gallery, also in Turlock.
Except for a few pieces, all the art I brought with me from the U.S. is in digital form.
When I started painting in Taiwan, I did mostly small pieces because we had nowhere to put them. Framing isn't cheap, and you can't just pound a couple of nails to hang a picture here! Concrete walls require drilling and expansion bolts or anchors, so it takes more than just a little drywall filler if you're going to change your mind.
I'm scanning in everything I do now and I save the hard copy only if I want to have the original on the wall somewhere. If I file away the hard copy, I know it's only temporarily. Eventually, I will not keep the originals.
Recently, I've seen a lot of well done digital painting (example) by people who really know how to paint and are doing their work in digital form from the beginning. Always intrigued by technology and new media, I've played with this kind of thing before, but in the last week or so, I've picked up on some of the newer techniques. The dragon, above, was created using only a mouse in a free, open-source, shareware program called GIMP which is similar to Photoshop. I started with a blank page and painted directly with the mouse, onscreen, first in black and white and then in color. I used "brushes" from another free source (www.obsidiandawn.com) to set the stage for many of the textures.
No less skill is required to make the image above than to paint one in a more traditional medium; it's just a different combination of skills. I still have to make all the choices I normally do--with the added advantage of a certain randomness and adjusting capabilities that aren't available in the physical world. The experience is different; the results are fun! I created "Emerging Dragon" in about 4 hours.
I expect I'll always do "traditional" art, as it's now being called. There's something wonderful about putting color or marks on a surface, or sculpting something. I will always enjoy that, and now I've added another medium to my options. What I like about it is that these images are then immediately available for worldwide viewing. I just post!
The other cool thing is that I don't wonder what to do with the hard copy. If I need one, I'll print it.
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