Traditional Artists < CG Artists [Language warning]

[Empuska]

Invisible Elephant

You CAN use the undo button in real life, you've just got to have a greater understanding in what you're doing.
TRUMPET!!!

I would love to see your face, when you see doing with watercolors and noticing that color wasn't the right one for it. :B

To continue the babble of the topic starter's post, it depends on lot how do you work. For example coloring grayscale work afterwards can be easier and not so...learning compared to watercolors, but then again, we have lots of guys, who do everything in one layer from the beginning to end. I do it, and only thing that differs is it doesn't eat all my moneys like acrylics or oils. Of course, I use undo, but it makes it just quickier, not easier. And working with Painter, which courage more or less, doing everything correct at the first place, I doubt it differs so much with working acrylics or oils.

[Bottled Poe]

I respect everyone's opinons here.

I do very much agree that CG art looks much better than scanned traditional art, because, it's like it's home base. It's meant to be seen online, therefore, it looks better online. Scanned traditional art often has loss of colour, too much saturation, or not enough, and pixels around the piece quite often.

My comment about the higher skill required to use traditional materials wasn't entirely meant to come across as CG users are less skillful than traditional.

I know both sides of the argument. I have used a tablet before, it DOES take a lot of getting used to. You can't look directly onto the tablet, because nothing shows up, you have to look at the screen to see what you're drawing. The pen sensitivity is different than the lead in a pencil, and the tablet itself often does not have the same feel as paper, it's smoother.

I only say it takes MORE skill to use traditional, because of the people who don't know how to properly USE CG, and get paid more just because it's CG. If you understand what I mean.

I know, it's fake currency on Gaia. But I base my Gaia currency intake on potential real life sales. Of course I take in the fact that my work is traditional, and a little bit of quality is lost when I scan it, but my work is definitely better than some of the CG artists I've seen here.

[Bottled Poe]

EmpuskA

Invisible Elephant

You CAN use the undo button in real life, you've just got to have a greater understanding in what you're doing.
TRUMPET!!!

I would love to see your face, when you see doing with watercolors and noticing that color wasn't the right one for it. :B

To continue the babble of the topic starter's post, it depends on lot how do you work. For example coloring grayscale work afterwards can be easier and not so...learning compared to watercolors, but then again, we have lots of guys, who do everything in one layer from the beginning to end. I do it, and only thing that differs is it doesn't eat all my moneys like acrylics or oils. Of course, I use undo, but it makes it just quickier, not easier. And working with Painter, which courage more or less, doing everything correct at the first place, I doubt it differs so much with working acrylics or oils.

Yes, I was also going to address the "undo" thing.

It's very much HARDER to correct a mistake made with traditional materials, rather than computer work. You cannot deny that. It's much faster, easier in the sense that it doesn't take as much time, or effort to click a button, rather than start over, or paint over etc.

[Kaxen]

Braindead Kappa

I only say it takes MORE skill to use traditional, because of the people who don't know how to properly USE CG, and get paid more just because it's CG. If you understand what I mean.

I know, it's fake currency on Gaia. But I base my Gaia currency intake on potential real life sales. Of course I take in the fact that my work is traditional, and a little bit of quality is lost when I scan it, but my work is definitely better than some of the CG artists I've seen here.

CG is easier to sell not easier to do... the people on Gaia like their shiny animu.

There's different demographics to go after than... Gaia...

[Saraneth 6th Bell]

Digital work does display far better online than traditional, generally, but yeah, I've gotten pissed at how pricing works here before. I get that it's an anime loving community, but I don't have to be happy about it. :'D Although I don't generally feel underpaid, I just feel that many other people's prices are severely inflated. It's often not just traditional vs digital, but shiny animu vs other stuff, since I've seen some traditional anime sell pretty well, although granted, the artists were good. I do a lot of digital stuff now too, and I think it might be slightly better received, but that could be because the colouring is a little more in depth than some of my traditional. I've been neglecting it lately.

There is a massive WTF factor about how much s**t art people are buying, though. It's like... DON'T YOU PEOPLE HAVE EYES? I get that not everyone is rolling in virtual, fake money, but why not save for something good instead of blowing it on crap?


And yeah...scanning. I hate it. Oldish scanner + LCD screen = hell. Although I think I've managed to scan stuff at a fairly decent quality so far. Coloured pencil scans horribly, but my graphite, watercolour and marker stuff generally looks okay. Although it does exaggerate imperfections horribly, and picks up bright colours in strange ways. Lucky photoshop is there to help out. :'D

[Empuska]

Braindead Kappa

Yes, I was also going to address the "undo" thing.

It's very much HARDER to correct a mistake made with traditional materials, rather than computer work. You cannot deny that. It's much faster, easier in the sense that it doesn't take as much time, or effort to click a button, rather than start over, or paint over etc.

I doubt people use so much undo as you think. I mean, it is much easier to just delete the problem area or paint over it. Latter is something, what people with acrylics and oils do quite a lot, so in a way CG painters use same methods as traditional painters. At least I rarely use undo, when I'm painting, it just easier to paint over and correct it that way.
I don't think it makes CG easier. Of course, for start, it might seem really easy, but if you keep practising with various tools, you learn to avoid certain mistakes and also correcting them. In that way CG might seem to be bit frustrating, because it doesn't teach you to live with that mistake, if you make, but by time you learn to do the right thing at the first place, while CG artists need to repeat it few times before they left that Undo-option away.
After all, you have to learn the anatomy and color theories by heart, if you want to be good at what you do. It doesn't depend on do you work in traditional medium or digital medium.

[Dark_Lady_Jade]

lol

I said something very, very similar to this a couple years ago, and like, at least half the people in the forum jumped on me and started attacking because of my different opinion.

I understand exactly what you mean, and I agree, it can be very frustrating. I also like and enjoy CG art, don't get me wrong, but it's also nice to see more traditional art on the site.

People say that CG usually shows up better, but I don't think this is true. Flork is an artist who does both traditional and CG art, and regardless of what he does, his work always shows up nicely. Heck, when I draw stuff it can show up just as fine as CG (just look at my gallery). For me, I learned that if I'm going to put a picture in color on the computer, I have to use slightly darker colors and press harder when coloring, and work to make sure the strokes are more solid and go in the same direction.

[Zenia Wulfe]

EmpuskA

I doubt people use so much undo as you think.

*nods* I barely ever use the undo function. I use the eraser or paint over the mistake like you would have to do traditionally. I only use it when like... I fill in something I didn't mean to or something really big.

[Uronoro]

Braindead Kappa

I know, it's fake currency on Gaia. But I base my Gaia currency intake on potential real life sales. Of course I take in the fact that my work is traditional, and a little bit of quality is lost when I scan it, but my work is definitely better than some of the CG artists I've seen here.

Gaia is a BAAD place to make a basis on how well your art will sell in real life.

1) You are a traditional artist, and probably will present and sell your art in a tangible real-life setting (and if not, I would recommend that to you, alongside an online personal website gallery). Most of the time, people are more willing to buy traditional art if they can hold it in their hands. There's something very nice about it.

2) Is your target audience high schoolers? Even though there are people past high school (and those who haven't gotten to it yet who probably are breaking the age requirement of this site) that is the bulk of the ages of the people who will be seeing your work here. The majority don't take this place seriously in the slightest, so this is a bad place to get feedback to see if your work will sell because the majority of the population doesn't care for anything except procrastinating on their homework and spamming for gold. Plus, there really is no set equation to how Gaia gold translates into... whatever currency your country uses.

I'd recommend finding a community of artists who actually have experience taking commissions and selling their work to get a feeling of how much you should price your work and then start up a small, but real, shop. (maybe you should look into artist corners in conventions?)

3) Not all, but the majority of the audience at this site, when looking for artwork will nose straight to the anime. On here, anime is a hot commodity. In the real world of selling art... not so much. I'm just saying, if a modern-day Van Gogh started doing avatar art here he probably wouldn't get as many buyers as the shiny anime artist across the road. But, the prestigious art museums would be scrambling after his work. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Basically what I'm saying is that the art buying audience on Gaia is so narrow minded. Most wouldn't give a flip for abstract painters and sculptors, who would otherwise be famous in the fine art world.

So Gaia = bad place to judge the successfulness of your artwork.

Unless you are targeting the anime loving /high school audience.

[nechuroo]

OP, I think it would definitely have been a good thing if you had gotten that mathematical mark right in the title. It says that CG artists are greater than traditional artists, lol.

On that note, I think you're very right. And that's coming from someone who really sees computerized artwork as a liberating necessity of sorts for the otherwise secluded art world, a world that hides in museums and dusty collector's corners.

With the digital medium art has been set free and is now actually able to fulfill its purpose; because you know as well as I do that the primary purpose of art is to be experienced. Any other sense-making simply comes as a side product.

However, the Internet has made the tools needed to make very basic art with software available. This has resulted in lots of "geeks" and "gamers" getting their hands on things like tablets in order to do their thing in Photoshop, the most known software application for making artwork.

Which is funny because Photoshop isn't even the right and proper tool for that task. Illustrator mixed with Painter does a better job. Photoshop is just for post-processing and web design (the latter simply due to technical limitations).

It is the hybrid app, the jack-of-all-trades. And so these mediocrities grab the most mediocre tool for making artwork and fork out money for the right tools, forgetting proper principles of art making in the process - after all their results come basically out of "I leik art" and "I herd Photoshop wus gewd".

In this sense I agree with you. It's a shame. It's the dark side of liberating the art world.

[wickeddelight]

I'd like to point out that art bought on Gaia is for a totally different purpose than art bought in real life (with the exception of vanity art like caricatures, which are basically the same purpose as avi art.)
Art in real life is bought so you can take it home with you, put it in your house, and look at it whenever you want. With digital art, unless people watermark their stuff, any piece of art you like you can just save to your computer and look at it whenever you want, no payment necessary. Actually buying it is only necessary if you want to 1. Display it as a status or vanity item 2. Get a custom-made piece or someone to custom-color your own drawing, in which case you are mainly paying for the service, or 3. Get a B/C or RP pet, in which case you are paying partly for service and partly for membership in a community.

So yeah, I sell CG art, and it's not that high quality, but then I sell mine pretty cheap. It actually takes long to color than if I were using markers and pens, about the same time as if I was doing watercolor, but the result is shinier than either. In trying out to be a colorist for various shops I've found that there's prejudice within the realm of CG art too - I do texture-based art and a lot of shop owners seem to only be interested in solid colors with soft shading. They are welcome to have their preference, it doesn't bug me except I wish they would say so at the beginning so I don't waste my time coloring their examples. Customers, pleasantly, don't seem to have the same prejudice - when I worked at one shop as a colorist alongside a colorist doing the solid color/soft shading thing our pets sold equally well.

Given my personal preferences, I would be a socialist and live in a world without money, where the only reward for making art would be praise/popularity, But since I have to live in a capitalist world, I at least find satisfaction in knowing that if people pay for my stuff, it's because they like it, and I try to brainstorm what customers would think is really cool (and thus pay more for.) Does that result in 'higher quality' art? Not directly, although I think it's totally debatable what 'quality' art is - I hate realism, so anyone whose definition of high quality art is art that is the most accurate depiction of reality, I don't agree at all. But I don't really care about an abstract definition of quality - I care about making customers go, "OMG how cool!!!" And that kind of thing is particularly easy to do in digital art through the use of textures and filters to make pets that sparkle like gemstones, have skin made out of pearls or imprinted with circuits, or fur made out of billowing flames or lightning and stormclouds.

[peasprout]

it's hard to make traditional art look as clean as cg after you put it on the computer ... it's hard to make it look as good as irl

[lavonia]

I think a key point was made regarding the issue. That key point is that digital work does show better in digital format than traditional work. This is not always true, but is often true. A beautiful watercolor, oil painting, or carved printed will never look as good digitally as it does traditionally. That is why traditional work often shows in galleries where it can be appreciated properly. Digital work often is used for commercial means, esp. in digital formats.
____

I do have 10+ years in a variety of media. Traditional painting, photography, printmaking, drawing materials, sculpture, ceramics, and digital. Within those media I've tried various applications of the media, for example stonework, aluminum cast, and plaster cast in sculpting. Oil, acrylic, ink, and watercolor in painting, etc. The list goes on and on.

The point is that based on those years of experience, this is my conclusion: No one media is hard than another. It's just differences of media application and differences of the user. One artist may find one media to be easier or harder based on their stylistic and technique tendencies.

I do very well with traditional media, much better than with digital. The style works well with my natural tendencies. Digital is a challenge for me. I've been etching away at it for years, honestly. There are thousands and thousands of different methods for using a tablet and Photoshop. It can be quite complicated and require much skill.
____

It's not just about digital. If you have never tried something and aren't fluent in it, you really have no right to make judgments about others and their abilities in it. That's not to say you don't distinguish good art from bad art, that's to say you shouldn't call something easy when you really have no knowledge about it.
____

@OP. Sometimes you may need to play smarter, not harder. If people here don't appreciate your work, consider showing it elsewhere. smile If you search around, you'll find a place where you can fit and and be appreciated for what you do. ^^ It can be frustrating, sometimes less skillful people get more attention, but that's going to happen anywhere you end up.

[God-the-almighty]

If someone wants to waste gold on crap let them. One of the favorite avi arts I bought was done in colored pencil.