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 Art in the Age of Computers      My last post was a bit critical of relying too heavily on computers for art so today I'm going to talk about how incredible they are at aiding it. Computers allow us to generate much more complex works with seemingly endless resources and entirely new mediums in 3D art and animation.      In the past, when my grandfather was an artist, he kept a stash of magazines and photos to use as references and inspiration. Now all that is easily organized digitally and we have internet access to find whatever we want instantly. Not only that but guides, forums and education about any given topic are ever at our fingertips.      By delegating tasks to programs like photoshop and illustrator, we are able to take art further and with more efficiency than ever before as well as experiment without consequences as we can simply undo mistakes. Want to adjust the contrast? Go to levels. Distort an image to e...

 M.C.Escher and Photoshop     M.C.Escher is, by far, my favorite artist and did his work well before the age of computers. I strongly recommend you look at his art at mcescher.com. Why he was amazing is he would mathematically plan out things like tessellations or distortions to make impossible landscapes. I've seen this type of planning simplified by using a grid but with the lines distorted like a sphere is pushing them out. As an artist I can tell you this sort of thing is extremely difficult to do and make it look natural.     The reason I mentioned computers is that programs can easily replicate his methods. I've seen tools that create tessellations and personally use a legal copy of photoshop. Photoshop has filters like "spherize" that automatically produce the distortions the name suggests. It's an amazing program.     The issues that arise revolve around artistic integrity. Are you creating art or is the computer doing the work f...