The Marriage of Video Games and Oil Paintings
Digital Artist Richard Tran Compares Oil and Digital Painting
Dec 13, 2008
When making artwork for Sony, do you feel a similar or different satisfaction as when creating solely for your own enjoyment?
It really depends. I actually don't do a lot of images for myself, I have other ways to burn off my creative energy. What actually satisfies me the most when working on an image is when I find "it." When the colors and strokes are working and I'm excited about the concept and the design.
I actually like having several ongoing projects, some days I won't feel into a particular image so I'll just pull up another one. I usually have a couple of images that I find something to get excited about. Just yesterday I was working on a lizard-man character and I was having an amazing time with his arm, the planer values were just perfect and it was delicious to work on.
Your digital and oil/acrylic on canvas paintings have obvious commonalities visually, but could you describe the different experiences you have with each technique?
I did try to hold true to my formal education and I developed something of a painterly style in my digital work. I think the most impacting difference between the two was the immense ease of digital painting. The undo hotkey is a terrible temptation. Traditional mediums tend to get messy when you work into it too much and there is a lot of process done before you actually start working on a painting. There are sketches and studies to be done before you get to the canvas.
While I think it’s important to carry those traditions to the digital medium, I've found that my process has condensed itself quite a bit. A value study can easily become a color study and because of the nature of the medium, with a simple slider you can make endless experiments with various colors to create just the write palette and mood. I've never been a very disciplined draftsmen so I find myself drawing something out, erasing and drawing into it as necessary and then painting directly on top of that. Conversely, while digital painting gives you a lot of freedom to experiment with your painting, there’s much less room for those "happy accidents" that some artists love and make use of.
Digital paintings easily end up looking too "digital", edges tend to soften and brush strokes tend to look uniform. As an experienced digital painter, it’s interesting going to a bookstore and identifying which covers were digitally illustrated and which ones were done traditionally. Most covers are actually digital now but you have a few hold-outs and I happen to know a few artists who have hybridized. They would paint in a traditional medium, usually with oil paints and then rework the image digitally.
If you were going to show your complete body of work in a physical space, how would you do this?
I think my first plan would be to set up monitors to display the images as digital images. I'd also have flat monitors "float" on the walls if I could manage it, maybe have the cables hidden away somewhere. I think digital images lose a lot of depth once they are printed. Traditional painting works under the assumption that light reflects off of the paint to produce value and color.
Digital painters work in a unique situation where light is glowing from behind their image. I think somehow this difference subtly makes its way into the work. It'd be important to me to keep that somehow. I hadn't tried it, but it might be interesting to print out my work on paper and then mount them on a light-box, though I doubt my darks would work out.
Do you think digital art is comparable to fine art? How is it important?
This is an awful question to answer. There are too many ways to really go at it with different answers on the other side. My knee-jerk answer would have to be yes, digital art is comparable to fine art. But I would say that the evaluation process for digital art is different in some key ways from traditional art. Process becomes less important than technique, and digital work lacks the idea of time that’s so prevalent in sculpture and oil painting. Then there’s the matter of whether the art is something like what I'm doing, illustration or whether the work is digital art for the sake of it being digital. I tend to think the first has some of the same struggles that traditional illustration has but the latter is much more interesting conceptually and I could almost say seamlessly slides into fine art.
Richard Tran is an artist who lives outside of Denver, Colorado. He enjoys oil painting and digital painting such as the work he is currently doing for Sony's Legends of Norrath. To read the first part of this article, please visit Video Game Art Appreciation 101.
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