bells and whistles or chiming in and pucker a tweet

Wouldn't it be great if you could get all you ever imagined in a drawing program and all you had to do was click the icon. It doesn't happen in the real world and it won't happen on your desktop. Besides, if you take the human element out of drawing on the computer, you wouldn't need the human and you couldn't call it art. You'd call it math, science or programming. But still the most complex iteration of code could never equal the subtle expression in a line under control of the whims of thought, emotion and imagination of the human mind and articulation of the hand. Mimic maybe, but never equal. In art we call "workflow" the process that gives form and direction and the final result. Process can be computerized but there is no one program that does it all well. So, we have bit-mapped software and vector software. I am learning to use both on the same projects to make up for what the other lacks. You learn to import and export parts of a drawing to work on it with the most advantageous tools. Bit-mapped programs have erase as well as undo, then you can trace the bit-mapped image back into the vector program and integrate it back into place. It is like a sidebar to explain a point in detail, then getting back to the main story. Gimp and Inkscape work great together. In Inkscape, I think the object fill is so limited, even if you can get it just right you can't alter it much once in place. But if you design your fill pattern, export it as a bit-map into GIMP, make tweaks and adjustments, import it back into Inkscape, trace the bit-map, now you can do a Boolean operation to fit the object to be filled. Yeah, it is a pain to go back and forth, but they say artist must suffer to get great art. And just think, because it is all on your computer you don't have balled up sheets of paper all over the room, reminding you of frustration and anguish. Trial and error is replaced by discovery and recovery. Don't forget to save your work often, "to back up is the beginning of wisdom."

What's so cool about computers is if you come across a color combination you really like, you can save the picture and use a color picker tool to find out what that color is. Gimp has a built-in color picker tool and there is a stand alone application called Gcolor2 in Ubuntu Linux you can download. This app will tell you the numerical value of the color many other applications understand as well. Then if you need companion colors that harmonize or compliment, Agave is the application which suggest which colors work well together.

So, to dispel the notion that computers replace the artist, automatically producing output that can't really be called art. Computers are tools, they require skilled manipulation and imagination, just as would any art materials and media. Computers do nothing without an operator and without an artist, be it a programmer or pixel pusher, can not make art. If you are stuck on traditional artist media, that is fine. But the technology to produce/reproduce art works has progressed to a great degree. You have to ask which is the original art work, the graphic file or the finished printout or copies?? Digital changes everything. In drafting, we see a machine like precision and clarity of details. You can have that in art but I'd rather not. I like the hand drawn and the opportunity to discover the story. If it looks like a square I don't want to measure it or know if it's true, the impression of squareness is enough, that's art.

the artist tool kit

Just like when you go to the theater and are awestruck at the visuals, you still can't fathom the behind the scenes activity that went into putting it all together. It is the same with most visual arts. On one side there is the disciplined training and determination of a practiced hand, then you spill the paint, step in it, "hey, that looks quite good". There is a flow of ideas, alternative ideas, adjustments, additions and deletions. These things are easy or difficult depending on the media. I have anguished over mistakes while painting with acrylics, they dry too fast and painting over painted areas is not the same textured surface anymore. With digital media I don't worry about drying time and the wonders of undo and remove are without bounds. I can add virtual textures or print it out on a textured canvas. Some even go through the trouble of simulating textured brush strokes. The outcome of most art is eventually digital. There might be an original oil painting, but sorry, you can only have a copy and lucky you if you own the original. Copies of most art today are usually prints. The process of making prints have evolved and improved over the years. You can capture the quality of any art work with a camera or a direct digital file and print it out on almost any material from glass to canvas to carpet. What has this to do with Linux? Your Linuxville guide, who also happens to dabble a little in art, has found that the digital artist tools found in Linux are quite good and very powerful and free. Not "free for personal use only", but really free. The GIMP is pretty cool if you can put down Photoshop envy for a while. I use the Gimp interface to access my scanner. I scanned most of my hand drawings and will use another application called Inkscape to trace the scanned images and turn them into vector images. Think of bit-mapped images as pictures made from grains of salt, tiny separate grains. Vector images are made of strings, outlining objects. It is easy to edit the strings. Also the strings are stretchy. You can blow it up to a larger size, keeping the same original proportions or bend and distort. The computer as an artist tool can be very automatic and/or hands-on to twiddle with minute details. The computer can help you to blend many artistic techniques, simulating traditional artist media or scanning or photographing or what ever. There is still a lot of controversy over how digital media is regarded. People haggle over monetary issues all the time. Should an oil painting be worth the same as a digitally produced picture? Then if the digitally produced copy is the exact same as the digitally produced original, what is the value of either and who owns the original? The market is not so much in the digital picture itself as it is formatting and producing the output. The same digital picture can be posted, plotted, or printed in any imagined way. Oh, I'm giving away all my secrets.......... Anyway there are a whole slew of services out there so you don't have to own the equipment yourself. You've got to get your name and work out there. Man, it's a crazy world. It is a sign of the times, the deskchair artist, the roving laptop artist, have arrived.