I'm fascinated by how people choose to represent themselves on the internet. The photo you see on the left is taken from someone's personal profile on a networking site...but I don't believe for a moment that it is a photo of the owner. I made the copy on the right using digital paint. In the past when making digital paintings, I have started out from a physical pencil sketch which I have then scanned and coloured in. In this case, though, I worked directly with digital paint on digital canvas.
The method I used is a painstaking process of using the pipette to sample colours from the original photo, then using those same colours to paint a copy. This one took me about two days to produce. I'm pleased with the hyperrealistic result, both with the flesh tones and the reflections on the water. But is it art? Have I put enough of my own artistic skill into reproducing this image to be able to call it my own? Or have I just chosen a slow and laborious way to make a copy of something that my computer can do in an instant? And do I risk getting sued by the owner of the photo, whoever that may be?
My next challenge, I have decided, will be to produce some original digital paintings that are not based on photographs. I think I'll still sample real skin tones from real photographs, but use them to produce original images, not copies.
No comments:
Post a Comment