3
Walked into an art gallery in Portland and realized my digital work was missing something
I went to this small gallery in Portland last spring for a friend's show. All the prints there had this real texture to them, like you could see the brush strokes or paper grain. My digital stuff always looked too smooth and fake next to that. So I started adding custom paper textures and brush overlays to my digital pieces before I export them. Has anyone else found a trick to make digital art feel less sterile?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
averywilliams12d ago
That smooth digital look is actually what a lot of collectors pay for though.
3
thomas.parker12d ago
Remembered seeing those older film scans with that almost painterly grain texture and honestly thought anything digital was just cheating or lacked soul. Then I picked up a vintage digital camera from like 2006 at a thrift store and started messing around with it. That flattened out smooth look with the blown out highlights actually gives some of my shots this dreamy feel I could never get with my regular DSLR. A friend even asked if I was shooting through some kind of fancy lens filter or something. So yeah you're totally right, what I used to write off as sterile is actually its own whole vibe.
7
daniel_lane304d ago
Are people actually shelling out cash for that overly smooth flat look on purpose? I mean, I get that old digital cameras have their own feel (like thrift store finds being fun to mess with), but paying a premium for blown highlights and no grain seems backwards to me. Film has that texture and life because of the chemical process, (you know, actual tiny crystals reacting to light) while digital just smushes everything together into a plastic-looking mess. Collectors buy into weird trends all the time though, just look at how much people spend on vintage clothes that are literally falling apart. But calling that sterile, washed-out look a "vibe" feels like we're trying too hard to make cheap tech into art. Maybe I'm old school, but I'd rather have something that looks like it was captured with care than something that looks like it came out of a 15 year old point and shoot by accident.
6