Digital Art Programs
Art that invites viewer participation is the subject of interactive media, commonly a core course for all digital arts majors. In fact, you may climb through a progression of these classes. You'll start with an intro course in which you study the history of the computer’s use in art and learn basic programming skills. Digital art software gets better and better each year. The right software can help you paint faster and feel better about your artwork. Each program handles brush strokes and color blending differently, and the price tags vary from expensive to free. Adobe Photoshop still reigns supreme as an all-round industry standard for digital artists.
Digital Art Program
Program Overview
The Grossmont College Digital Art Program is unique and distinctive as the level of instruction about digital art goes well beyond the limited purview of craft and aesthetics. As the power of digital imaging in our culture and its multiple functions in society continues to be an important component of communication, the Program addresses the students' relationship to digital arts and its role and function as a personal, societal and cultural activity.
Faculty and staff that are actively practicing artists within a variety of fine art and/or commercial environments, including gallery and museum exhibitions as well as professional studio contexts.
Unique and dynamic curriculum that is a blend of critical discussion and digital art practice and reflects focused and individualized attention on developing and nurturing the students' studio art interests and educational goals.
State-of-the-art digital studio, including a 24 - station Apple lab with 21' Wacom Drawing monitors and the full Adobe Creative Cloud package at each station, 2 Epson 4900 inkjet printers as well as portable drawing tablets that can be checked-out for student use.
The Digital Art Program offers anAA in Studio Art - Digital Artdegree, providing an engaged approach towards artistic practice and critical discourse through a variety and breadth of studio arts, art history and digital art courses.
Digital Art Programs For Beginners
The fundamentals of digital art are set within a series of foundation and intermediate courses which reference the history and contemporary practice of digital art, includingIntroduction to Digital Art,Digital Imaging and Art,Digital Drawing and PaintingandDrawing for Animation.
With such an intensive program of study, students have the opportunity to define his or her path, whether it is to transfer to a four-year institution, portfolio and professional career development and/or personal enrichment.
The Digital Art Program Student Learning Outcomes (PSLOs) below are the expected outcomes that students will accomplish after successfully completing the degree requirements.
- Select the correct software and tools for manipulating a vector or raster graphic, problem solving and assignment objectives.
- List the specific technical skills needed to produce and manipulate images, as well as communicate ideas and emotions, through an understanding of the visual elements of art.
- Write an essay using the vocabulary of the elements and principles of design to describe artwork.
- Produce art work that demonstrates the ability to problem solve and think critically.
Interested in turning photographs into works of digital art, such as cartoons, charcoal drawings, ink drawings, oil paintings, pastel drawings, and watercolors? Here are brief descriptions of some key software tools for desktop computers. Unless otherwise noted they work in Photoshop as plug-ins.
FotoSketcher
FotoSketcher is a versatile free standalone Windows program that allows you to create drawings, paintings, and a few other effects. It can transform photos into cartoons, oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, pen and ink drawings, pencil drawings, watercolor paintings. and other types of artworks. It is standalone freeware.
Sliders and other controls for each effect allow you modify image rendition. For example, for the oil pastel sketch effect you can control minimum stroke size, maximum stroke size, number of iterations, edge intensity, and filter precision. You can also soften edges, add a frame, add texture, add text, and use a retouch brush. There is a small preview window in the floating control panel.
This program is especially useful for oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, and watercolors.
Snap Art by Exposure
Snap Art is a full-featured Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to easily create charcoal drawings, color pencil drawings, comics, crayon drawings. impasto paintings, oil paintings, pastel drawings (including hard, oil, and soft pastel), pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, Pointillism paintings, stylized illustrations, and watercolor paintings.
There are a variety of presets for each effect, and slider controls for background (e.g, for oil paint: brush size, photorealism, coverage, stroke length, and color variation), detail masking (similar controls as background), colors (e.g., brightness, contrast, and saturation), lighting (e.g., angle, direction, and highlight characteristics as well as vignette effect), and canvas effects (e.g, pastel paper). You can create your own presets. The ability to close side-panel controls permits a large preview space.
This program is especially useful for charcoal drawings, colored pencil drawings, oil paintings, and pencil drawings. It has good canvas and paper texture effects.
Dynamic Auto-Painter by MediaChance
Dynamic Auto-Painter, a Windows/Mac stand-alone program, allows you to paint in the style of famous painters, such as Paul CĂ©zanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. It allows you to create a wide variety of types of artworks.
There are a variety of controls for each preset, such as brush strokes, canvas, detail brushes, faithfulness, realism, palette, and quality. It supports advanced (e.g, color shift), retouch, outline, canvas, material, color, and layer adjustments. It is highly customizable. Artwork rendering occurs in stages, with further user fine-tuning possible during some stages. It typically renders vivid, saturated images, but image saturation can be adjusted.
While the presets can be used to easily create artworks, the real power of this program is not revealed until you start using the numerous advanced controls and directing brush strokes during the creation process. You are likely to experiment with a number of adjustments to get desired effects.
This standalone program is especially useful for oil paintings.
Other Digital Art Software to Consider
Depending on your artistic requirements and style, the following software may also be of interest.
- AKVIS Charcoal (charcoal and chalk drawings)
- AKVIS Draw (highly expressive, loose drawing effects)
- AKVIS OilPaint (oil painting and oil pastel effects)
- AKVIS Pastel (crayon, oil pastel, and pastel effects)
- AKVIS Sketch (charcoal, color pencil, lead pencil, pastel, and watercolor effects)
- AKVIS Watercolor (aquarelle and watercolor effects)
- JixiPix Aquarella (watercolor paintings)
- JixiPix Artoon (cartoon drawings)
- JixiPix Moku Hanga (block printing)
- JixiPix Impresso Pro (standalone; oil painting effects)
- JixiPix Pastello (chalk, crayon, pastel, and pencil effects)
- JixiPix Watercolor Studio
- ToonIt! (cartoon, graphic novel, woodcut, and other effects)
Useful Photo Editing Software
The following software is recommended for editing artistic works:
- Exposure (standalone and plug-in; very powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets; highly recommended)
- Luminar (standalone and plug-in; powerful full-featured photo editors, especially useful for light ray effects)
- ON1 Photo RAW (standalone and plug-in; powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets)
- Topaz Denoise AI (very effective noise reduction)
Purchase Advice
It is highly recommended that you download and test digital art software demos prior to purchase. Try all the presets. A software company's idea of what a good art effect is may not match your own, so experiment with changing the settings of unsatisfactory effects before concluding that the program cannot do what you want.
Some programs do not have a variety of presets. It is more difficult to create your own presets from scratch rather modifying presets.
It is especially important to test the limits of a program and to determine what features can be disabled. For example, see how much detail you can get in a painting and check whether it is possible to turn off the texture effect (i.e, canvas).
In some cases, it is worth buying a program for one or two unique effects even though the rest may not be satisfactory or may duplicate effects you already have in other programs.
If possible, save older versions of software. New versions may drop or significantly change features you rely on.
Software Licensing and Sales Policies
AKVIS has separate home, home deluxe, and business licenses. Only business licenses allow commercial use. Dynamic Auto Painter has home and pro versions.
Companies may offer one or more software bundles, which reduce the prices of included products.
Some companies, such as Exposure, offer their products at substantial discounts during sales, which typically occur during major US holidays. These are especially good times to buy software bundles.
About the Author
Digital Art Programs Free Download
Digital artist Charles W. Bailey, Jr. transforms public domain and personal photographs into noncommercial digital artworks using specialized Photoshop plug-ins and art programs. He has made over 600 digital artworks freely available under versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses, providing detailed information about how each artwork was created, and, for public domain images, attribution of the original image creator (if known).