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Starting A Digital Art Program With Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "We are running mainly Windows on our HS campus with the exception of Macs in the visual arts department, and are just beginning to get into the process of teaching using computers in the area of art. What recommendations do you have for starting a program? I am looking fo apps that will be able to be used on both our Macs and on our PCs in the Library etc., and specifically I am looking for a program (curriculum, not software) for teaching digital art concepts using the FOSS tools that are out there. I am aware of Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape, but have not seen any curriculum per se. Any help?"
Then again, it might backfire.
:-)
How many artists want to use an app that is more in line with geeks than actual true artists. I've got good friends that make their entire living with this stuff. I've shown them things like Gimp and they just scoff -- and its understandable why they do so.
F/OSS software is generally software designed by geeks for use by geeks. I've seen a LOT of great sutff come out of it, but almost always, the person on the other end has been a techie first and foremost and an artist second.
I'm on the other end...I'm an artist first and foremost, and a geek secondary. I run a programming / research office for my university, but I still make more money through music activities. And I use a Mac for my personal needs -- why? because it was set up to be invisible to the end user. To a techie? its a bit infuriating at times because you can't do everything you want to do, but to others its a godsend if you can afford one (that and I generally have a terminal window open at all times so the interface doesn't get on my nerves so bad
If the goal is to engage geeks -- this is a good idea. if its to engage others, I'd stay away from most Free and Open Source apps.
BTW -- I cut my teeth in 3D using POVRay on a 486DX (it was soooooooo slow on the SX), so I hope I'm geek enough not to be considered a troll.
Precisely. Let me tell you a little story.
I entered Art School around 1975, about the time I started building my first microcomputer from a kit. I majored in drawing and photography, but dabbled with computers and took a lot of computer classes. The compsci department treated me like crap, I was just a dumb artist (yeah, a dumb artist that switched majors from Honors Chemistry/PreMed). But I was the first person to exhibit computer graphics and primitive computer animation at my art school. The art school Dean was very conservative and considered drawing/painting, printmaking, and sculpture to be the only valid areas of study. Even the new Photography department was considered the Black Sheep of the family, it was not art, merely technology. I got kicked out of art school during my senior year, they got fed up with me. I used to go around telling my professors that I was sick of drawing with charcoal, that technology hadn't changed since Paleolithic Man dragged a burnt stump out of a campfire and scratched it on a cave wall, I wanted a NEW artist's studio, more like a mad scientist's laboratory with bubbling beakers and sparking coils.
So I went to work, and spent many years working in prepress, computer graphics, etc. To my utter astonishment, as new computer tools like Photoshop were released, I consistently found that my traditional art school techniques (i.e. my darkroom classes) were the most valuable training I could have taken in preparation for these programs. I consistently got better results than the computer geeks around me that had no art skills.
Back around '92 when the recession hit, I decided to go back and finish my BFA. And to my astonishment, my old art school was only then just installing its first computer classroom. By that time, I had seen and done about everything in the computer graphics field, I completely abandoned doing computer graphics and focused on oil painting. And when I finished my degree, I found my CG work was much stronger. Anybody can push around pixels (or paint, for that matter) but it takes artistic skill, training, and practice to understand why an image has to be THIS way and not THAT way. If you have no ability to plan out what kind of result you want, you will have no way to create the work. You will be randomly wandering through the program trying to figure out why you aren't getting results.
I continually assert: there is NO image you can create with a computer that can't be done with conventional tools. It may take an infinitely larger amount of effort, but it could be done. The fundamentals of art production have not changed with the introduction of computers. This is why it is easier to train artists how to use computers than it is to teach computer experts how to be an artist. Artists always know what they would like to create, maybe they have dreamt of artworks that were beyond their capabilities before computers, but they still have ideas about how they would go about creating the artwork even without a computer. The same cannot be said of computer geeks, they cannot see how an artwork could be created without computers.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last. My old Photo professor said that a true artist can make art despite his tools, a great photographer could take great photos with a pinhole camera, but a crappy photographer couldn't take great photos even with a great camera. Great art tools like computers are useless in the hands of someone with no artistic training.
F/OSS software is generally software designed by geeks for use by geeks. I've seen a LOT of great sutff come out of it, but almost always, the person on the other end has been a techie first and foremost and an artist second.
Hah! That's a joke. It takes just as much time to learn Photoshop and Lightwave as it does to learn Gimp and Blender. People sometimes scoff at the new generation of F/OSS graphics software because it's not what they're used to. But I find it just as difficult to use Photoshop after years of using Gimp, so I can understand where they're coming from. The key is educating the next generation on F/OSS tools from the beginning so that we can finally move away from the rip-off proprietary standbys. At the rate that Gimp and Blender are improving, there will soon be no valid technical reason why they cannot be used even for the most professional of tasks. As for the UI side of things, it would be an interesting project to develop an alternative Gimp interface designed for current Photoshop users. It's more about familiar layout than anything. In the grand scheme of things, both free and non-free software needs a lot of work to improve in the HCI area..