Conánn FitzPatrick

Update: Written in early 2004 this page is painfully out of date. Doing more and more digital art these days, mostly 3D and not enough painting!

I have mixed feelings about digital art. While I really feel that it is worthless in the long run it does serve as a wonderful bridge between drawing and working in colour. Colour has scared the bejesus out of me for as long as I can remember. When I was in school I was very envious of people who could paint and that was only compounded when I started working in Sulivan Bluth Studios in Dublin where the background department was a thing of pure wonder.

Before I left animation I started doing some paint work in colour using Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and while the subject was limited in style and colour to things I had drawn over and over and where very familiar with, it did show me a way of working that was doable. As I went along I tried adding a few more colours but mostly relied on different layer tricks to get the results I needed.

Over the next few years I kept up the practice with varying results through 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, and 7.0. and as with all of the other software packages I owned they had always done a great job of making it much easier with every release to get the results I was looking for. To anyone else that would sound absolutely great but I started using Photoshop in version 1.5 and had taken many jobs based on a certain amount of expertise which over the years had become a filter here a layer here and a plug in there. I knew that as good as I could ever become I would only be six months ahead of the next whiz that came out of college. This was not a problem only with Photoshop it was a problem with every program I was learning, even Outlook Express gets new features that make old methods obsolete with every release.

One morning I thought I would get wise like most computer users and while making an upgrade destroyed one of my partitions and a few of my best pieces; My blood ran cold I doubt there is an honest person out there who has not felt that feeling that no expletive can express. The penny finally dropped! Digital art does not exist! No matter how good I get, no matter how beautiful a piece of work I create, I will never be able to hold it in my hands or stick it up on a wall. To be honest I have never seen it look the same from one monitor to the next. Most importantly there is no saleable original.

The day the penny dropped I got in the car and drove to the Art shop and bought a set of Windsor Newton Oil Paints for about a fifth of the price of a new copy of Photoshop (No quibbles about the price of the software, they do great work at Adobe). It's been a hard road but three years later no version 1.2beta.

There are some amazing and inspirational artists out there who work digitally, everyday I check out there work in awe. I just can't work at that pace anymore, you can't go to town for a coffee while waiting for a file to dry.