CREATING ON THE COMPUTER

DESIGNING WITH LOW RESOLUTION PAINT PROGRAMS

This is a continuation of the previous blog dated March 14, "Discovering Abstraction," also about using low resolution paint programs, for designing organic and/or geometric compositions. Some draw-paint tools may be found in word processing programs. An old program, Claris Works, predating Apple Works, used on Mac computers had such features.

Created in Claris Works 8x11"     © by Ruth Zachary

As you can see, the program could create several geometric shapes of several kind, outlined or not, and including rectangles with rounded corners. Organic shapes could also be drawn free-hand with a mouse or a tablet. The paint tools were great, too, with gradient fills with two colors as shown above.
Brushes could be customized to make streaked tracks in a certain color, which would often show more than one color, depending upon the color of the background. The airbrush or spatter tool was interesting too.

I saved this design in a simplified state, so I could make many other experimental variations, which I choose to call working in series. I save the variations I like. One advantage to starting a composition in a low resolution program is that you can work very rapidly, and intuitively as you would using paint or other tools, but you can easily save all the steps in between. Low resolution also does not require much storage space. Designs or small sections can easily be copied in one program and pasted into another.

Orange Blue Brown, 8x11"  © by Ruth Zachary

In this stage of developing the series, the image was copied into Photoshop and enlarged somewhat to fill letter sized paper. I frequently create different layers using that capability in Photoshop, and use

different experimentally textured images over the basic design, usually labeled "background." This 

time the design was flipped horizontally. I do not remember what texture was placed over it, but usually I make the top layer somewhat transparent, and then try changing the mode of the top layer.

What will result usually cannot be predicted and sometimes nothing is worth keeping. But  some compostions created in this experimental way offer a wonderful place to start and move on.

Aqua Violet 4   8x11"           © by Ruth Zachary

This time the background layer was flipped vertically. I believe I used another textured layer, and later,  a drawn layer, and perhaps even another layer at different stages of experimentation. Some resulting images look nothing like the original, but I chose those which retained some of the basic design for this demonstration so the viewer could see traces of the evolution to this stage. 

Many of the designs created in this way do not use layers all the same size. Sometimes free hand shapes are cut and pasted and rotated within the original layout. Often large portions are cut out of another composition and placed into the basic design. Or sections can be put into different layers and shuffled to make a completely different composition. There are design choices made at every step.

The computer as a tool allows an infinite number of options, but the computer is not in control. The artist is the one making the aesthetic decisions. It allows the process of creation to work at its best!

Writing and Images shown here are the Copyright  © of Ruth Zachary.