Visual Alchemy: The Fine Art of Digital Montage

377 Pages·2013·23.81 MB·English

by  Catherine McIntyre

VISUAL ALCHEMY
VISUAL ALCHEMY
THE FINE ART OF DIGITAL MONTAGE
Catherine McIntyre
{Contents}
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Digital manipulation as a medium of expression
THEMES
Finding your subject
Themes
BEAUTY AND IDEA
INFLUENCES
INSPIRATION
The influence of practice
The influence of environment
SUBJECTS
The portrait
The nude
The landscape
Architecture
The natural world
Still life
Myth
Abstraction
Absence
COLLECTING SOURCE MATERIAL
Taking source photographs
Treasure hunting
Finding a model—portraits and nudes
Photographing portraits and the nude
Anatomy
Still life—making your own subjects
Building an archive
Interiors
Taking it outside
Public and private collections
Found photographs
Non-photographed input—scanning and filters
Using drawing and painting
METHOD
Technique
Resolution and image quality
Creating a background
Selection
Avoiding selection
Evolution
Shadows and light
Combining textures
Translucency
Cloning
Developing your image
Practice
Saving it and final touches
COMPOSITION
Proportion
Geometry
Gestalt theory
Symmetry and asymmetry
Complexity
Focal point
Achieving perspective
Framing
COLOR
Color and space
Color and mood
Color gamuts
Color contrast
The absence of color–monochrome, sepia and color tints
TEXTURE
Finding textures
Reflections and refractions
Pattern
Microscope to telescope—playing with scale
Using texture
TONE
High-and low-key images
Tonal contrast
INVERSIONS
Color and tone inversions
Solarization
Orientation
DISTORTIONS
DEVELOPING YOUR IMAGE
Developing style
When is a picture finished?
Struggling for ideas?
THE FINISHED IMAGE
Archiving
Getting your work “out there”
Agents
Permissions and copyright issues
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Acknowledgements
Model release form
Further looking and reading
Contributing artists
Index
{Preface}
Visual Alchemy is for people who, like me, want to make art. Whatever your
aesthetic or technical background, I hope to inspire creative development and
research by example as well as by suggestion, and help you to analyze and realize
your own artistic ambitions.
I am a Scottish digital artist, and have been working in the medium for more
than fifteen years now. I am often asked about the creative process, inspiration,
and technique. This book explains my method and inspirations, in the hope that
it will set you off on your own explorations.
I made traditional art—drawing, painting, sculpture and collage—for decades
before approaching the digital, and still do from time to time. I apply the same
decision-making processes to whichever medium I choose. These are the subject
of the book. This is an aesthetic guide to composition, color, texture and all the
other means of communication that an artist has at their disposal. It discusses the
creative process—the part that comes after you have acquired the basic tools; it’s
the exploration, and what to do with those tools. It is about ideas and how to
express them, rather than the ins and outs of the software. You won’t need too
much in the way of kit. Any laptop or desktop computer will happily run
Photoshop, or any of the other image manipulation programs; you probably have
a camera on your phone. A basic working knowledge of Photoshop will be useful
for the reader, but not essential, as the ideas will apply to any digital program,
and indeed to any medium. Your most important tools are your eyes and brain.
Start to look, and really to see. This book explains how to use the inspiration
around you to make art.
Digital montage is still a brand new image-making tool. It is interesting that
value judgments are often placed on Photoshop as a medium; no other means of
making art are reduced and disregarded in popular perception in the same way
(with the possible exception of the airbrush). Just as with photography until
remarkably recently, in purist circles digital montage has yet to be accepted as a
valid art medium. In August 2012, The Huffington Post reviewed an upcoming
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Faking It:
Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. The review suggests that “In the
good old days before airbrushing a zit or sharpening a blurred figure was just a
mouse-click away, the task of transforming an image was an art form.” I would
argue that it still is. It has never been simple; the problems are simply different.
The program’s flexibility and versatility is almost held against it, for making
things too easy; it is dismissed as being slick, even dishonest. This view does not
do it, or its practitioners, justice. Working digitally is not somehow “cheating”.
There is no magic button that makes a picture for you. A computer does no
thinking. It simply a tool that allows artists to express themselves with more
freedom than ever before. Photoshop allows transformations that were impossible
in the darkroom, and makes others much easier; however, all the choice and
potential it offers is actually a challenge. You can do anything, so you have to
decide what to do.
Art has never been “pure” in the sense that the word is used about Photoshop.
It is not a plain, simple reflection of the world, and it should not be. Art relays the
world through the artist’s eye and brain, and translates, enhances, transforms.
Painters and sculptors always did this. Traditional photographers do it too; by
selection, dodging and burning, simple cropping, they are presenting the world as
they see it. They are improving upon their raw material. If Photoshop can
improve it further—and it can!—it is simply Luddite to ignore it. Method is not
the product; the image is everything. There is now a growing digital art
movement producing work that will, soon I hope, join film photography as a
serious, eloquent—and collectable—art form.
I make pictures that I would like to see; no one else has made them yet, so it’s
my job to find them. It’s your job to give your own inner visions to the world.
There is no one else who will do it quite like you. I hope this book will set you
thinking, and help you along your own creative path. Good luck, and happy
picture-making!