I am primarily interested in painting and drawing, but I happen to have a background in programming. I create and use digital tools as a means to draw. Architects, filmmakers, photographers have increasingly incorporated digital tools in their work to enhance the creative process. I'm trying to show that painters, sculptors, and printmakers can also move their art forward using digital tools.
I began using the vector-based graphics platform, Adobe Flash, and found that it lends itself to developing these drawing and drafting-like as opposed to painting functions. Flash Actionscript makes it fairly easy to program eccentric functions like splat and wire frame. Other platforms (Processing, later releases of Flash) could be used to create functions that mimic painters' tools. I created the initial functions of the interactive drawing program to see if I could mimic splattering and slinging of paint. I wanted a tool that balances control and accident so the rendered image is modified something like texture, viscosity, gravity, and momentum modify brush strokes. I attempted to introduce the look of spontaneity and improvisation using random number generation to function like the accidental sling and splat of wet paint on canvas. The result to date is an eccentric digital drawing tool with somewhat recognizable brush and line functions, but with randomness and accident modifying the digitally rendered object. I am just partly successful in creating brush, splat, and ribbon functions that create marks as if slung on paper rather than drawn. However, in attempting the original goal I created a number of other, more interesting tools. The wire frame, ribbon, and perspective functions, as well as plot, grid, import, and splat have generated as yet limitless possibilities for new drawings.
I find creativity in writing software similar to painting or drawing. Some digital artists concentrate the creative process entirely in their software development. I have attempted something half way in between with a drawing program that gives considerable control back to the user, providing interaction. Digital art software and traditional media differ in that software shifts the creative process, sometimes entirely, toward the development of the tool. At one extreme the entire look of the drawing or digital art can be determined in software. Randomness can be interjected to make each rendering slightly different. However, I think I have yet to see any digital art that approaches the quality of traditional painting and drawing when the artist simply creates a program and uses randomness to vary each rendering. I have no problem taking this approach with my home page because it's only a web-based portfolio. I am, however, promoting the concept that when digital tools return control to an artist through interactive functions then the artist can create new, good art.
Developing software can be no less creative than the process of selecting and refining the tools of traditional media. When software is written to create drawing tools then the possibility of the end product drawing might not exist without the software. I have an idea what the software tool will provide before I code it, and I may even sketch or lay out a sample rendering. The process begins as a concept sometimes including a drawing, moves to coding, then back to drawing.
Creating software sometimes leads to accidental discoveries as spontaneous as painting and drawing. The tool I offer partly determines the result, but I leave the rest up to the decisions of the user, and to accident.
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