About Archie Chipps

Why I started doing digital art

Date: 02/13/2020

I wanted to have art more people can have without needing to make every single one. I had a list of people that wanted art that was always stretching beyond 6 months of work. I raised my price to lower that number to something I could finish before the new list grew back to 6 months of work again. A lot of people wanted my art but could not pay for it, while printing copies would spread my art around more. So I moved away from all that and took a job working as a repair man in a truckstop. Then I bought my first device for digital art which was a Super Nintendo with Mario Paint. It was one step before I went all the way with my first computer. I took out a loan to buy the second best made with parts from China. I was working with 16 million colors while everyone was only seeing 256 colors in 1994.

What I found, the good and bad about digital art

Date: 02/13/2020

I found that while I worked with the pixels that I learned from Mario Paint, that the computer blends these pixels by painting in as many pixels as needed. This made it easier to blend using a soft brush while I still worked with each pixel and view what the viewer will see at 100% to make that view highly detailed In traditional art I paid $70 for a 3 hair brush, and the Yellow I used was up to $125 per tube. With digital art, the brushes and paint is free, and I can do better than photo-quality art without showing the big brush strokes. The digital brushes can be microscopic at 1 pixel or fill the whole canvas with a single stroke to paint a gradual blended sky. What is bad about digital art is it can be gone in a flash with the power goes out without saving the file, and the file you can can be changed and not able to change it back. This means to protect the original you need to save copies of it and keep them safe from corruption. Art can be lost forever and nobody will see it. The digital artist needs to change how they see their old art, like it is just a paper trail of where you have been. It don't show what you can do, or will do. Your best work is in your future not the past. This make losing art a little easier. There can be moments when you make art, lost it, make it again, lose that, and make it again, and what you see is each time of remaking it, you are better.