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Wikipedia has a good general definition of digital art.

The definition above introduced you to the technical terms so here is here is the techniques and tools I use specifically:

 

I am a 'conventional' digital artist that currently work in two dimensional mode using mainly raster graphics. My work consists of the following techniques which are often used in combination to create a work of art.

Digital Painting

Digital painting is an artform in which traditional painting techniques such as watercolor, oils, impasto, etc. are applied using the computer, software and digital tools such as a digitizing tablet and stylus.

This approach has a number of benefits for the artist which is often difficult or impossible to achieve with more traditional methods. A digital artist can arrange their painting in layers that can be edited independently. The ability to undo and redo strokes is a very useful feature and beats a rag and turpentine any day. A digital painter must employ many, if not all, of the techniques and study of a traditional painter. The digital artist has a ready-made pallette consisting of millions of colours and the same painting can be reproduced in virtually any size and on a wide variety of media. The digital artist also has wide variety of tools that can easily be used in the same painting such as erasures, pencils, spray cans, brushes, combs, and a variety of 2D and 3D effect tools. A graphics tablet allows the artist to have very precise hand movement simulating a real pen and drawing surface.

Computer Generated Art

In this context the term means art generated by the computer itself by some algorithmic or other formulative process.

I very rarely publish a computer generated work of art as is, as I feel that although it was my computer time and effort that produced the piece of art I am not really the owner has I had nothing to do with the creation and inventions of the formulae or algorithms and software that actually produced the piece of art. The only exception is if I find a piece that is so beautiful or striking that I feel I cannot improve on it. To me computer generated art is another source of inspiration and I often use it as a starting point or part of a work either as texture or background.

This can be quite a time consuming exercise as the computer has no idea if the images it creates is beautiful or not.  It is up to the digital artist to decide whether the generated image is of further use. Saving one in a hundred generated images on average is good going.

A special form of computer generated art called evolvative art helps a bit in this regard. You can point out an image you like and it will evolve more images in a similar vein. In a way you can teach it what you like and improve the hit ratio a bit.

Photo Manipulation

Photographs are a great source of inspiration to me and the tools for manipulating images are so sophisticated that an infinite variety of options exist to create a work of art out of photograph(s). As with computer generated art I seldom publish a photograph as such simply because I do not currently see myself as a serious photographer. The photograph is a starting point and can be the major theme, a background, a texture or only a small part of a work.

Image manipulation software allows you to adjust colours and tones, contrast, applying all sorts of filters, sharpening, blurring, morphing, changing perspective, cropping, blending, stitching, distorting either the whole or selected part(s) of the image.

What is possible is only limited by the artist's imagination.

This techique is also known as photo art or paintography.

Scanography

Scanography is very similar to photography as the scanner is in reality a high resolution camera with a shallow depth of fiel d. Suitable objects can be scanned directly and it can also be used to make non-digital art digitally accessible such as scanning a pencil sketch or painting.

The tools I use

My main workhorse is the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). I  also use Inkscape and Xara Xtreme for vector  graphics work. I do quite a bit of scripting not directly to produce art but more to automate repetitive tasks in the whole process so that I can be more productive in creating art. My language of choice is Perl and I use the Perl interface for GIMP as well as some script-fu. I also make extensive use of ImageMagick from Perl.

In addition to some appropriate GIMP plugins I also use the following to explore computer generated art:

• Xaos and XFractint for fractals
• Fyre for exploring de Jong maps
• Evolvotron for evolvative art

I am currently experimenting with Blender and POVRay for some 3D modelling but have nothing of note to publish yet in this field.

Artists are now embracing various forms of computer art, combining traditional painting with algorithm art and other digital techniques to come up with unique art pieces that was virtually impossible to create before the current technology became available.

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