Photoshop is SO darned much fun. It is a drawing and painting program. Most of my friends at Hallmark use this program for their illustrations. The sky is the limit with Photoshop. I am drawing on a Wacom pad with a “brush” and as I said before, recently have finally been getting my painted look (with the whymsical dogs). I can’t justify the time it would take to do full blown illustrations yet, but have been asked a couple of times lately to illustrate children’s books. I would use this “new” look I’m developing if I chose to do that.

A computer is just a tool. You can draw on it and paint on it. It is really no different than learning how to paint with a brush. The basic elements of composition, color, edges, lighting, etc are the same. The only difference is that you use a Wacom pad instead of a canvas. It’s really pretty exciting.

In many cases these days, even an educated eye would not be able to tell the difference between a computer generated illustration and a painted one when done by many of my computer savy friends. They are doing work that looks just like hand painted watercolor, loose oils, etc. It really is amazing.’

I’m curious. Are they simply taking digital photographs (eg, of animals) and processing the images?

I have photo processing software that (supposedly) produces “paintings’ (oils, watercolors, pastel, etc) from digital photos, but quite frankly, the results don’t look at all like real paintings. Not even close. It’s very easy (even for a novice painter like me) to tell the difference.

So Hall mark must either be using some very sophisticated image processing software to “convert” photos to “paintings” or they are doing something different than merely processing digital photos.

of course, now you have piqued my interest and i will have to get some hall mark cards and magnify the images to see what this is all about!

Larry, I laughed out loud at your comments in #16 post; the whip cracks are authentic, of course, but I never thought about lapping the cabin. Heh heh heh…the summer workshop will probably wish you’d never posted.

To me, computer generated animation is much like “canned” music. My father was a professional musician (a trombone player). The very thing that makes music so magical is the human element of it, you know, the part that comes from the heart. My dad could bring me to tears with his music. Canned music is music that is generated digitally. It is perfect, cold and impersonal. The imperfections in animal hair, in the way trees grow, in the way an artist interprets all of these things is where the essence of being human is. So Larry, I quite agree with you, especially concerning digital animation.