About Me: Hello and welcome! I'm a retired professional landscape/nature photographer and bush pilot, now located in Southern Ontario, Canada. As a photographer, my work has appeared in books, calendars and magazines of National Geographic, Carlton Cards, Key Porter Books, Nature Canada, Ontario Nature, Equinox, Harrowsmith and numerous other well known publications. Additionally, while as a member of a national image stock bank, my photographs have appeared in publications around the world. In 2017, I made the move from photography to digital painting, compositing and illustrations in order to expand my horizons and talents. In 2004 when I migrated from film photography to digital, I learned the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop for purposes of digital image editing, and have been using it extensively ever since to do digital photo processing, compositing and digital painting.
A Note About Digital Art
Digital painting started as an offshoot of traditional drawing and painting, often used in concept art, manga, etc., but now has become a discipline in its own right. Instead of a set of brushes and paints, we use a stylus and a tablet, and 'push pixels' as rendered by software to draw out our creative works. Tablets range from small pen tablets to pen displays or self-contained graphics computers. With pen tablets, one draws with the stylus on the tablet and watches a computer monitor to see what is actually being created. With the pen display, the art is displayed on the tablet's screen and the artist draws directly on that. The graphics computer is much like the pen display, but also contains the computer as part of the unit. The biggest advantage to the latter two is that it's very much like drawing or painting on a traditional canvas, but without the mess. The software provides the brushes (strokes), paints (colours), and a host of ancillary but very important tools such as the ability to select and move objects after the fact, the ability to change or undo previous attempts at drawing/painting without having to start over from scratch, warping, shaping and bending parts of the image, as well as many, many more functions you don't have with traditional painting. I have heard some suggest that this form of painting is 'cheating' and not 'real art'. I couldn't disagree more. It is simply a different medium. Just as one has a host of skills to learn when working with traditional media, the digital artist also has many skills to learn in order to master her/his tools and craft. They are just different to that of the traditional media artist, but equally as demanding. Fortunately as digital painting becomes more common and used in more applications, it is becoming a more accepted form of art. Most film studios employ digital graphic artists now as opposed to traditional media artists.
The software I use is Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is probably the foremost application for digital painting and is considered the industry standard, although competitors are catching up. I use Illustrator to 'manufacture' human-made designs, especially the more intricate pieces. Illustrator is better suited to making precise objects in my opinion. My hardware consists of the Apple Studio, a BenQ 22" HD display and (most importantly) the Wacom Cintiq 24 Pro Pen Display tablet. I also employ a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium tablet as the need arises.