A Smart History of Digital Painting

A Quick History of Digital Portrayal



What is digital painting?

Is it digital photos in digital picture frames? Is it every artistic digital photo? It is digital video shot with a handy cam? Perhaps it is all three.



Technically digital portrayal was born when the first IBM mainframe was used in conjunction with a digital printer to make a photo out of asterisks. This crude and ugly photo was the first digital picture ever printed. This occurred in the late 1970s. Since then, printers have improved greatly and so has the attribute of the medium. What most normal humans consider painting didn't arrive until computer programs could create a wide array of colors, images and games. This period flourished in the early 1980s. During this period we saw digital dot matrix printers produce almost life-like pictures out of tiny dots. These slow and time consuming behemoths were the cusp of the digital age and they popped out of nowhere. Most people could not afford these expensive and bulky printers that were top of the line for their day. Abstractionists in Soho quickly grabbed onto the concept and began pumping out current pictorialization with digital printers.



In time, digital abstraction progressed into something that we can call the "active medium". Paintingists in Soho began to hang flatscreens and use live action in their digital abstraction. These flatscreens showed still life digital photos and live action digital video. This realm of painting is just about contemporary with today but with one exception. This type of show was popular in the Soho community among bohemians except that there was something lost in the digital hype. Art has a strong history of personality. There is something lost when microchips do the painting, and these up-to-date exhibits lacked character. This was true until 2007.



The latest craze in digital pictorialization is to recreate the past using a digital filter on cutting-edge photos. This branch of painting is exploding as the commercial requests for it come pouring in. This branch comes from the fact that these paintingistic filters can be used to transform average digital photos into elaborate impressionist paintings. This can be done with a standard filter and an unique photo. Commercially this pursuit has found success for the reason that when it is paired with an first-rate color printer, it produces what looks like custom paintings on canvas. Pictorializationists can take a basic digital photo and transform it into a "faux masterpiece". The public simply can't get enough of this. These digital forgeries are rag in the bucks. When these photos are printed out on canvas, the look like a classic impressionist portrayal. So digital portrayal has come a long way, and in the last few decadeor so, it went commercial!



Ben Rama is a Graphic Designer, CG Artist & Cinematographer from London.

He is the founder & leading-edge director

at Digital Empire with many years of experience in Graphic Design, Film & TV within London.