Graphics essay

How have recent advances in computer technology affected story telling within artwork?

The issues raised by the heading grabbed my attention as I thought this type of subject matter would be the most fascinating. My initial perception that it has but further research would be interesting to find out if it confirmed or disproved it. Furthermore, it would be most interesting to see how artists managed to produce graphic design without the aid of modern technology that we all rely on and work with today. For example, creating such traditional products as album covers, posters and book covers must have been more time consuming and difficult for the designer. Before the invention of computers, designers worked with a limited amount of traditional tools such as scalpels, pens, letraset, paint, screen-printing, drawing boards, typesetting machines and the darkroom.

With a film camera, which is light sensitive chemical based, you couldn’t see the photograph at the time you took, so you could only wait for it to be processed. It was a common theme in that period, if you made a mistake, you would have to scrap it and start again. With a digital camera, when you capture the photograph, it automatically displays the image so you don’t waste time.

The definition of storytelling is a way of conveying typography, words, music and images to get a significant message across; they are occasionally improvised, but are mainly provided as a source of entertainment. At times, it can be educational or it can be just some harmless fun. The key essentials to a good story are the plot, characters and setting. Since the caveman era, humans have demonstrated the ability to convey messages, starting with drawing on cave walls. They used natural materials, like charcoal sticks for drawing and for painting; they used blood, crushed berries and juice from fruits. They didn’t have words, so it was only a very basic and crude.

In spite of all this, story telling in the 21st century, the information age, has become much more straightforward than ever before with Adobe Packages such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash and many more. This type of computer software allows the photographer/artist to have full control over their work and imagination, stretching the limits and boundaries of reality, and to further expand their minds to create the ultimate impossible situation. Besides Adobe software, there are also many other digital narratives like short animations, films, and even interactive games.

In my opinion, I believe the Internet has had a major impact on the artistic society, the result being that it has inspired and motivated hundreds and thousands of new artists. For our generation, it’s becoming much quicker to discover new and exciting artists online and on artistic websites like Devianart, Tumblr, etc. Furthermore, the large amount of helpful tutorials from websites like Youtube, on how to draw e.g. human facial features, it makes drawing simpler than even before. Lastly, graphics tablets enable the artist to draw in the digital world. A tablet allows direct control over the pressure; therefore it’s very similar to drawing with a pencil or pen.

Throughout this entire essay, I will reference my three chosen graphic artists, which will help me analyse and draw my conclusion, distinguishing if development in computer technology has really affected the way we tell a story. I made sure that all the narrative artists are varied. The first artist is a young manipulation artist/photographer called Nicholas Max. He experiments with scale and with the utmost impossible, and if it weren’t for technological advances like Photoshop, he wouldn’t be able to achieve any of his realistic results.

My second artist is a drawing/digital artist called Alex Green, I chose him due to his very distinctive style and approach to drawing. Green combines the traditional hand drawn and digital method producing powerful drawings though body language leading to warm compassionate illustrations. My final artist is another manipulation artist called Paul M Smith and he uses himself as the subject matter to portray normal situations.

Nicholas Max His passion for photography started at a very young age and he regularly used the camera that his parents had at home. All his photographs tell a story-a secret that is waiting to be discovered, a memory or a place in time.

Max is currently 20 years old and is studying Film and Photography at Virginia Commonwealth University in America. Lastly, in 2013, he was ranked in the top 5 Photographers - United Colours of Benetton.

As a great lover of graphics manipulation, such as Photoshop, it was more than obvious that I was going to be immediately attracted to Nicholas Max work, due to his extremely well edited and very believable photo manipulations. After viewing his work, there is a hint that his main theme is rather melancholy. The subtle colour tones, the warm glow, and shadows look correct and are composed well. Furthermore, the forestry locations make it look like a scene straight out of a magical fairytale book.

Also, his strange, unique ideas combined with his vivid imagination, gives him his own signature style. My favourite images are the scale manipulations, which involve tiny humans, and large objects. The calm colours, and the haziness that’s surrounds the background gives it a strong depth of field which make it dreamier. To create the soft dreamy, glowing appearance, it’s not a digital method; instead Max “Puts pantyhose over the lens and it gives a dreamy kind of quality to it.” and “For others, get glass and scour it with metal and stuff, just to get different kinds of cracks in the glass and it refracts light in different ways.”

After researching more about Max, he gets inspiration from feeling emotions like heartbreak, friendship, etc.

But not only that, he is also able to get influenced by his location. He like going into woods, so he can experience a “weird euphoric state” where he starts “daydreaming, going off of that and producing works in response to the feelings he get.” Also he “feeds off of his environment” and “usually stay hours in one location, figuring out what he want to do on those spots.” and sometimes he doesn’t even have a proper plan, and just sketches it out in his mind.

In an interview, he said that he looked up to many artists like Gregory Crewdson, who spends thousands on his sets to create fantastic movie sets, Salvador Dali, who was his main influence for surrealism and lastly, Cindy Sherman who does a lot of self portraiture and dresses herself up as different people, which is rather similar to the artist, Paul M Smith.

Furthermore, he does not only use Photoshop, but a multimedia mixture. Max uses the darkroom, and sometimes prints out his images and then actually hand-manipulates them, which is unusual for this age. Max also paints on them, and then scans them back in into Photoshop, to see what else he can come up with.

Max makes the objects look like they are floating in mid-air, as you can see in the picture above; “Picking up the pieces� The underlying theme in this could represent heartbreak and betrayal. This would have been impossible many years ago. In my opinion, the only illusion they could do this back then was to cut objects out and stick them down.

I believe the type of raw feeling he is trying to get from his audience is sadness. Max wants to sweep the viewer off their feet from their normal packed lives and wants them to just take a moment to relax and gaze into his image and feel a sense of ambiguity and mystery.

Alex Green Alex makes beautiful drawings that capture the essence of body language and sketches them in his own unique expressionistic style. Green also is rather happy working conceptually whilst making ‘lifestyle’ images. Lastly, over the years his work has been used in newspapers, magazines, packaging and murals.

The reason I choose this particular artist was because I really liked the simplistic look and composition of his work and I wanted to study something different, other that just photo-manipulation. Furthermore, Green does traditional drawing on paper, and incorporates different media into his work by combining his drawings with digital art using Photoshop or Illustrator to create an old vintage feeling to the piece. Also, he draws mainly people. At first glance they look like ordinary sketches of people in normal situations, but as you look closer, you see something completely different (As the image above shows). Lastly, I like how even though it’s done on a computer, he hasn’t made it completely perfect drawing, he has kept the sketchiness thus it looks like an actual traditional drawing.

For example, in the image above which I chose out of his e-portfolio, it shows a full shot illustration of a man wearing a colourful bright orange suit, this suggests that he is the main part of the image and that we should direct our focus onto him instead of the background characters which are slightly faded and coloured in.

However, if you look at his deformed shadow, I believe that it represents him as an evil looking demon, which foreshadows horrifying events that will take place in the distant future. Due to they’re being no captions in his illustrations and it all relies on the visual representation of the piece. It makes us ask important questions about the drawing. Is the man attending a party? Who is he talking to? Why is his shadow so warped and strange?

What is he planning to do there?

Furthermore, Green takes normal places and objects and puts them together in ways you wouldn’t expect as you can see in the illustration above. It shows a sketchy looking couple in a bed together, covering their ears due to the loudness of the traffic. Yet why are they in the middle of traffic and why is there a man shouting at them?

For some reason, I believe the cars look like they are meant to represent the walls in their bedroom due to the orange caravan on the left having a window. The fact that Green could have coloured his sketches traditionally by hand by using e.g watercolours instead, shows that he prefers to colour digitally, since it is quicker, easier and has full direct control over his work. Lastly, due to the seriousness and the claustrophobia of the picture, it is hard to decipher what Green is trying to represent and what message he wants to get across to his audience.

Comparing Max’s narrative photos to Green’s illustrations, they both at first glance, have very different styles of story telling. Alex Green tends to draw out his story on paper first and then use Photoshop brushes and textures, while Max photographs his models and objects with a digital camera and then manipulates them. Yet the thing that they do have in common is the surreal element within it. One of the main differences is that Green focuses more on ordinary people and Max tends to focus more on the extraordinary side and his stories mainly evolve around objects.

Paul M Smith Smith is a British photographer and was born in 1969. He is Course Director for the AB Hons Photography course at the Royal College of Art. Smith studied Fine Art, in the early 1990s at Coventry University, and as part of his course he then undertook a research project into contemporary art. Smith also has done commissioned work; including projects for channel 4 and a CD cover design for Robbie Williams.

When I discovered that all the people in his photos were the artist himself that was when the image was really brought to my attention. The best feature about his work, was how amazingly natural and convincing the photographs looked at first glance. On average, when manipulating digital images in Photoshop or in any other package, there are often flaws and faults that get missed. For example, the amount of lighting, shadows, size and the colour tone.

To create such natural compositions, I believe that Smith has kept his digital camera in the same position on a tripod, and first, taken a clear picture of the background and then taken several pictures of himself in different positions, creating a serious, yet interesting narrative. After he has taken all his photographs, I believe he then erases everything but the character in the image. And then combines and by doing that, he has created a fantastic, realistic image. In my opinion, even though they are all duplicates, the different expressions and the angle of light, gives them a separate identity. Also, the most impressive thing is that every bit of detail has to be accurate like where he stands and, where he looks, I experiment with this technique and I found it was a little difficult, particularly using perspective.

Smith’s inspiration for this project; “Artist Rifles” was his older brother, Steven, who influenced Smith to join the Royal Engineers to start with, and whom he followed into the army. Artist Rifles was the only the beginning, exploring around the main theme of is masculinity, of what it means to be a man. One of the main reasons for creating this project was due to him confronting and questioning his own reasoning for joining the army in the first place.

"The roles I acted out during my childhood played a fundamental part in shaping my perception of military life.

I vividly recall the endless carnage I reaped with my brothers, played out in the local woods with an arsenal of replica weapons." This quote highlights the fact that his childhood has clearly influenced his desire to pursue a career as a solider. Moreover, the manipulations highlight the strong effects of the military routine on a person's identity, and also because they like look alike, it’s meant to represent out they are all brothers in arms.

The definition of the alpha male, is a young man who acts tough, has to been the centre of attention, feels insecure about their life, or is normally a leader of a pack, it is an reoccurring theme though his work especially in the project, “Make my Night” within it explores the theme in a rather humorous manner.

In the photo above, he shows the self-portrait of a typical lad’s night out on the town, which is part of a series meant to look like snapshots taken throughout the night, by overexposing the photos, having blurry movement and giving them normal natural lighting, etc. he makes it look even more realistic. The key element with this project, is that they all have different clothing and personality, so unlike the last project, so it really gives them a sense of realism.

The major difference with this particular artist is that Smith recreates normal situations of the humorous adventures of typical British lad out at night and as a serious army soldier fighting for his life and for his comrades. The other two artists however draw and manipulate to create the absolute impossible. Contrasting, his pictures which look more straightforward and are definitely easier to understand, and even though both of his projects are deeply dissimilar, I believe he has been successful.

In conclusion, starting with Nicholas Max, technology allows him to produce much more realistic images to enhance his storytelling. For Alex Green he doesn’t use the technology to improve the image, just to speed up production and to simplify it. Lastly, for Paul M Smith he chooses not to take advantage to use much technology, and tries not force the ‘perfect’ image upon the viewer. Also, it would have been possible to use darkroom techniques, which involve laying the picture on top of one another, however this would a slow process and modern techniques have enabled him to increase the volume of work he produces. Overall, I believe recent advances in computer technology have definitely changed how we all tell a story though artwork. It has made the act of story telling much easier and quicker than ever before, since there are fewer limitations and there is so much you can do now.

Sources/Bibliography http://breezycreativedesign.com/2010/09/27/graphic-design-before-the-computer/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling http://elinorschwebach.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/what-did-cavemen-use-for-paints-when.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_storytelling http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/portfolio/artist-rifles/artist-rifles.html http://poictesme.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/spotlight-on-vcu-student-artist-nicholas-scarpinato/

By Samantha Dilley