Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    Just a stupid question, but before you dropped $3000 on a computer
    system, did you ever bother to turn one on and see what it could
    do?
    
    Ed.

    Yes.

    A 640 by 400 TV monitor cannot approach the resolution of high-quality
    paint and oil.  I have found a way to get better resolution, though it
    is not very convenient: I use Express Paint version 3.0, which will let
    you paint on a full-page 300 dpi image, in sections.  You can see only
    part of the image on the screen at any one time, but you can print
    the whole image on a laser printer, and use it while you are editing.
    
    The kind of hardware that you would need to do real artwork without
    such hassles is very expensive.
        John Sauter

    John is right - you get what you pay for in this world (mostly)
    
    Graphics/ark folk can EASILY spend over $40,000US in this country
    on equipment that produces amazing graphics
    
    I personally feel (having owned/programed a wide variety of Pc's
    over 10 years) that for the price, the Amiga produces a very high
    standard of graphical display.
    
    Phil  

    Yes, I agree with you and John.  It is good value for the money
    in the resolution department.  The problems are principally in
    that the software doesn't mimic the things the artists do.  An
    artist needs a very quick association with the palette colors,
    and begins with a color wheel of six colors (primaries and
    secondaries).  That association is poorly held together by the
    software.  The next step for the artist is to grab the brush.
    The ones in DigiPaint have no resemblance at all to the need.  When
    I learned that Digipaint allows the user to create a custom brush,
    I didn't realize it was all hype until I called the software house.
    Believe it or not you can't move paint with the custom brush, you
    can only paste a copy of it around.  Instead of calling this a custom
    brush, it should have been called "Custom Stick ons".  The inability
    to rotate the brushes was quite a handicap to an artist who used
    this software anyway.  Of course subsequent development of software
    like Deluxe paint permitted this, but only with serious drawbacks
    of limited palettes.  Unfortunately this is too great a limitation,
    and it appears that the software folks are limited by the hardware
    in this case.  Overall, this has led me to the conclusion, it is
    just too soon for small investers to realize the potential in Amiga
    Art today.  This is not to say, that some very talented people cannot
    come up with impressive works.  However, for myself, the real thing
    oil paint and pastels is a lot quicker and more certain way of
    getting to the same end.

    Although I don't claim to be an artist, from what I have read 
    (PC magazines, BYTE, etc) the Amiga + FlickerFixer + DeluxePaintII
    is definitely one of the top "personal" systems for doing artwork.
    Especially when you consider price/performance.
        
    The software may have a long way to go, but right now it's among
    the best you are likely to see. (On *any* "small" system)
    
    Steve
                                      
    --If I hadn't just bought a HD, I'd be glad to take that Flicker
    Fixer off your hands.  ;^)

    
    If you really want to get 'photographic' quality computer art, you'd
    have to get into a 24-bit TrueVision type board.  These are available
    for the IBM PC's and Mac II (and maybe the A2000 in the future), but
    cost thousands of dollars.  You'll still never approach the resolution
    of a 35 mm photograph, but you could get as high as 1024 x 1024 with
    hundreds of thousands of colors on screen at once. 

    If you are, in general, disappointed that a computer display doesn't
    look as good as an oil painting, then you're out of luck.  I've never
    seen computer generated art that I couldn't instantly recognize as
    computer generated, even when done on expensive workstations.
    
    About the best you could do would be to videotape your best artwork
    for playback on a TV monitor (which is what many artists/video
    professionals do).  When played back, the limited chroma bandwith
    of NTSC tends to smear the computer generated pixels together, giving
    more of an anolog blending effect.
    
    Ed.
    

>However, for myself, the real thing
>oil paint and pastels is a lot quicker and more certain way of
>getting to the same end.
                ^^^^ ^^^

WRONG, It is not the same end. The computer and software are just tools used to 
create art. The same goes for paint and brushes, pastels, clay, glass and lead
etc. etc. Would you try to create the Mona Lisa with stained glass? No. The 
kind of artistic effects available from any set of tools or medium are 
always different. You must learn to accept the values and limitations of
any set of tools. Both painting and "drawing" with pastels are similar
in that you generally deal with patches of color built up to create the overall
look. Apparently you could not recreate that feel with your new tools, the Amiga
and paint programs. You would not be able to create that feel with stained glass
pen and ink, etching, photography ... need I go on?

It may be true that the software is sold with a lot of hype, but as an artist
you should know that moving a mouse on a table and looking at a TV is not
going to be like painting with oils. The reason artist have always sought
out new tools is to create NEW effects, not to get to the same end as before.

Computers paint programs and ray tracing programs can do things that you CANNOT
do with oils and pastels no matter how hard you try. For example, have you ever
painted an oil and then allowed  thousands of people to see it within hours of 
creation? Anyone with an Amiga can see a computer-generated picture uploaded 
to a bullitin board/notes conference. Actually I've heard that some other 
computers can do this too. ;-} Or have you every tried to paint a picture with
hundreds of mirror-imaged balls in oils? 

If you went to a hardware store to buy a hammer, would you buy a wrench
just because the sales droid said it could do the same thing?

Dave

    re .8
    
    I aggree with the opinion that the computer provides a new method
    of art work and a new type of art.  For example I have a friend
    who is working at YALE University with Professor Mandelbrot and
    he is creating award winning artwork using fractal geometric equations
    to produce beautiful works.  His intention is that such computer
    generated work be considered to be true art some day.  He has had
    his work displayed on the cover of the IEEE "Computer Graphics and
    Applications" magazine Jan 89.  Many current graphics designers
    use the amiga to quickly rough out thier work to check out a design
    before using an expensive graphics time sharing machine.
    
    I also agree that such art will never replace oils.  Howver it will
    one day be an art form on it's own.
    
    

    
    How much for the flicker fixer and High res monitor?

Re: .0

It wasn't entirely clear from your message why you were disappointed with
Amiga graphics software.  Reading between the lines of your message, I
suspect that the reason why had little to do issues like resolution
or number of colors.  Instead the source of your unhappiness seem to
be that the software makes it too damn hard to produce artwork, and that
as talented as you are with brushes and oil, you can not reproduce the
sample pictures on the boxes that your software came in.

Reply .8 brings up a very important point.  Computer artwork is a very
different medium from oil.  Different techniques are required, and the
results obtainable in one medium are not necessarily obtainable in the
another.

Computer art has many disadvantages compared to oil; it also has some
advantages.  There are some effects possible with computer art that would
flop on canvas, and the reverse is equally true.

All of this seems to imply that computer art may (at least for now)
not be your medium.  A few notes back you implied that you were thinking
of trying an IBM compatible.  I suggest that you save yourself a lot of
time, money, and anguish: don't bother.  In general, Amiga paint programs
are reviewed very favorably compared to paint programs on other machines,
including those for IBM compatibles and the Mac II.  They are paint
programs, so they don't offer resolution independent drawing.  And,
they are limited by the number of colors displayable on the screen.
But, they are considered among the very best for creating graphics.
So, unless you like running Deluxe Paint II on a clone with VGA 
better than on an Amiga, you are letting your self in for more
disappointment.

Over the weekend, I was at AmiExpo.  There was a panel talk by artists
about the Amiga.  These were people who make their living painting
commercial art and spend their leisure time painting art to be
exhibited in galleries (and hoping it will sell!).

They were very enthusiastic about computer art and the creative opportunities
there.  One of the panelists had used the $40,000 computer art workstations,
and felt that the consumer paint programs on the Amiga had better user
interfaces and made it easier to get things done.

Can you use the Amiga paint programs to produce beautiful art?  Yes,
people do it every day--somebody paints those pictures that appear
on the paint program boxes, on the covers of the Amiga magazines,
and in the bulletin boards.  Is it easy?  Well, *I* cannot paint
them.  Is the effort reasonable to the people who can create such
art?  The answer varies, but there definitely seems to be a large
group that feels the answer is yes.

    If you don't like using a mouse why don't you get a light pen?
    
    matt
    

> I am very disappointed.  I bought mine to do artwork, and being quite 
> experienced in that field, I can honestly say I'd rather sit down with 
> a tube of paint than use the horrendously pathetic software on this machine.

Sorry you're having such a bad experience. I'm also an experienced artist,
but I don't expect the 2000 to have the artistic quality of painting. Recently,
I heard a professional artist talking to a high-tech audience, and mention
his realization that he spreads "mud" on cloth using wads of animal hair-
(i.e., paints in oils on canvas using sable and pig-bristle brushes). Here
we are using a 5000-year-old technique, and in competent hands, it easily
outdoes the best "computer art"... sort of. They're really very different,
though. It's like comparing movies and books- they share some traits, but it's
a mistake to say one is "better" than the other.

"Computer art" is still too new, I think, to develop a quality of it's own,
although there are obvious directions it can move, and obvious directions
it can't move. I think it will find a niche, but it will be more in the line
of kinetic art, interactive and responsive art, experiential art, or
"environmental" art, than traditional planographic art. It's true that the
tools are still primitive, but perfecting them will require many years of
feedback from artists to programmers and hardware builders, and, more likely,
a new type of renaissance artist, adept in both technology and humanities.
Computer art is probably now where movies were when Edison was making them in
New Jersey. We're still waiting for a new Eisenstien, or D.W.Griffith...

It's a strange experience- yesterday I saw the demo of the new 3-d liquid-
crystal glasses, saw a 3-d picture of a cat hovering on an Amiga screen.
Technically impressive, artistically meaningless. So I still use techniques
created by ancient Egyptians when I'm creating "art". Perhaps in the far
future, artists will bemoan the fact that they're still using primitive
techniques invented by the ancient Americans of Silicon Valley, and what
they consider art will be nothing we would recognize. "Computer art" shows
a lot of promise, but it's hardly drawn its first breath.

In the meantime, I agree with Randy Meyers and several other respondants-
you're wasting your time and money looking for "better" art programs for
the under-$40,000 range of computers. There are gadgets which you can use
with the Amiga to make input more "natural": I use a graphics tablet, Easyl,
to replace the mouse, and I find I can "sketch" and trace with ease. But
the results are not a pencil sketch or a pastel drawing. Nor are they what
I would consider art. I'm just having fun with it...

John O.

    Yes, I certainly agree.  I should have explained that I am not
    expecting the Amiga to produce an oil painting.   
    
    	For your information Renaissance artists, seldomly painted
    with an all at once technique (known as the alla prima method).  
    The difficulty encountering a number of problems in painting, led them
    to separate these out so that they can be worked on alone without
    the distractions of the others.
    
    	One example certainly is obvious to everybody.  Virtually all 
    Renaissance painters sketched the subject and solved the drawing
    problem first. They sketched these usually in oil and then painted 
    over them. Most were virtually monochromatic.  This was done in order
    to eliminate the confusing influences of handling the color problem at 
    an early stage in the painting development.
                           
    
    	I'll discuss the next stage in development shortly, but let
    me comment on how the Amiga doesn't handle this elementary level well.
    The mouse control is a pathetic way, to control lines on the screen.   
    Using preferences isn't much help in improving this, the mouse control
    can still jump when the rubber ball sticks, and the association
    of the Artist's eye with the mouse or the screen is in conflict.   
    I had bought the Amiga after being told about the Flexidraw light pen
    would come to my rescue, but Flexidraw withdrew this product the same
    month I bought my Amiga.  Shortly afterward Info magazine panned
    this pen.  
    
    	Continuing with the description of the Renaissance painting
    technique.  After the drawing was completed, separate color
    compositions were done on another canvas, used only for that
    purpose and discarded later.  The reason for doing this is analogous
    to the same reason an engineer would build a breadboard in the lab :  
    It's simply try and see if it works.  Many people seem to have a
    mistaken conception about artists, that they are just born with
    something that makes all this possible without a method, but this
    is madness.
    
    	But using the Amiga for the color compositions wasn't good either.
    The main problem is the poor accessibility of the palettes, which
    is among the first and easiest things an artist must solve.  The
    experienced artist quickly learns how to lighten and darken paints,
    but also to adjust the chroma, as well as hue.  RGB sliders are
    ridiculous for this purpose and the better software houses recognized
    this in order to come up with HSV sliders, instead.  Unfortunately
    the small screen size of the monitor didn't permit the palette to
    be placed with any degree of prominence on the screen, and the result
    was a nearly invisibly tiny palette with a confusion of colors placed
    side by side.  This is in contradiction to the established procedures
    of artists to separate out problems, so that they can be treated
    without the confusing influences of the other.  Frankly, I hope
    the software houses come up with HSV sliders only, and a full screen
    size pallette, brought in to view by toggling a keyboard key, which
    could also return this to the painting.  If I remember correctly
    Deleuxe Paint has something along this line, but better and faster
    access to this is needed, and to heck with the RGB baloney. 
    
    
    	Finally, after the color strategy is defined, the artists repaints the
    sketched canvas in a manner considering many other problems which
    are also separated out from each other.  Opaqueness and transparency
    are some examples.  Its a very complex process, that relies
    upon years of experience with the paints themselves.  To the
    onlooker, paint is just paint, its only the color that makes the
    difference.  To the oil painter, he has to worry about dozens of
    problems with every tube and it is as sophisticated a problem as
    building a complicated circuit in the lab.
               
    
                                   
    	So I was hoping to use the Amiga for these quick studies for
    some of the planning stages of the painting.  As you can see
    drawing never worked out, and color comps turned out much easier with
    real paint.  The Amiga was a real disappointment.  I still want
    to sell my system.
    

    Randy Meyers...I think your remarks just hit the nail on the head.
    In fact I think you said it all much better than I did!  Thanks.
    							Rick

> For your information Renaissance artists, seldomly painted
> with an all at once technique (known as the alla prima method).  
[etc...]

Sorry for the confusion, but what I meant by "renaissance artist" was
not a specific reference to artists of 14th thru 16th century Europe,
but a generic reference. The concept I intended was simply of persons
who are competent in both technical and humanities disciplines, and can
combine diverse abilities to create new art forms which draw from, but
do not imitate, existing forms. Usually referred to as a "renaissance
man", but this seemed to broad and too chauvanistic in context.

How much do you want for the Flicker Fixer?

John O.

    re: .13
    
    If you don't insist on "cloth", making art by spreading colored mud
    using animal hair is more like 50,000 years old.  Examples have been
    found in caves in France.
        John Sauter

	Interesting topic.  

	I think there may be a valid analogy in making music with
(home) computers.  Before MIDI there was a similar lack of  
"the interface we're used to"  and all sorts of new and cryptic
schemes for representing notes were invented for "data input".
But musicians didn't want to  "input data"  they wanted what they were
used to; keyboards, guitars, tape recorders, and more recently the
thing from Yamaha that looks to be a digital sax.  Many of the
computer based midi sequencers present user functions that map
directly to the tape recorder that they imitate, rewind, fast forward,
record, play, etc.  Its a lot easier to sit down and noodle around 
(sketch ?) on an electronic keyboard, then "record" via the sequencer 
and have it produce sheet music than writing it all out by hand and 
replaying it a few bars at a time to feel it again, etc.....

	But there doesn't seem to be a  "brush and canvas"  interface 
(yet) that can interpret the way a painter lays the brush down, how 
heavy the stroke, at what angle to the canvas and to the direction of 
the stroke, the effects of spinning the brush, etc.  Oh, it COULD be
done - I'm sure of that........ 

	R

    I'm in no way artistic, but I remember some time ago (6-12 months)
    seeing a supposedly "artistic" brush & ink program on the MAC.  It
    was supposed to model some form of Chinese drawing with ink.  I
    don't remember the name of the program or the art form, but I do
    remember the demonstrator emphasizing the fact that the program
    was made to work very, very much like the real canvas.  The brushes
    looked like real brushes and acted like one when touched to the
    canvas.  It was pricey also if I remember correctly (~$600-$800).
    
    -steve

    I would like to thank many of you for making requests that might
    permit me to part company with parts of my Amiga, but is anybody
    interested in the whole shootin' match?
    
    	A2000, manuals, workbench etc.  8 mos. old
    	joystick
    	Flicker Fixer
    	Mitsubishi Diamond Scan Monitor- multisync   Whow!
        Software:
    
    		Digipaint
    		Deluxe Paint
    		Photon Paint
    		Pix Mate
    		Sculpt 3-D
    		Deluxe Video              
    
    Whoops I forgot all about I've got speakers and:
    
    		Deluxe Music Construct Set, too!
    

    You've got a pretty high-powered system.  Likely, the readers of this
    conference either already have Amigas or are saving for one, in which
    case you'd be priced out of their range.
    
    If you'll sell the whole thing for the price of an entry-level A500,
    you might have some takers!
        John Sauter

    	Say it sounds like to me there is quite a lot of artistic talent
    out there.  Quite a heavy topic we all touched on?  John, what do
    you think of Peter Paul Reubens?  He ran virtually a factory to
    turn out paintings.  Many of his were gigantic in size.  He had
    a number of understudies  (Van Dyke) among them, that assisted
    with his work.  The surprising thing for me is that all of his
    paintings I have seen, unmistakably have his character.  Free flowing
    and happy.  Without experts to let me know, I would have guessed
    he had done all the work, and all the time.  I can't tell myself,
    where he left off and his understudies joined in.  His influence
    over his understudies was so strong that if you look at many of
    Van Dyke's works, they're difficult to tell apart from Reubens own.
    
    	Does anybody have any stories of their favorite artists they
    would like to share?  I enjoyed hearing about the new breed of
    computer artists, too.  PBS had an excellent program a while back
    showing some of the amazing things going on.  What did you all
    think of it?
    
    	P.S.  Don't forget, save a starving poor artist like me, buy
    my computer soon!  John tells me I should charge the price of an
    A500 if I want to solve that problem.  Golly, such encouragement.
    Thanks for the tip, I will keep in mind!

    
    The latest issue of INFO magazine has an interview with a successful
    Amiga artist who has just returned from an exhibition in mainland
    China.  The Chinese went wild over the Amiga.
    
    Ed.
    

    re: .22
    
    The only "Peter Paul" I am familiar with is a candy bar, or 2/3 of a
    60's singing group.  Van Dyke sounds like a TV actor.
    
    I don't know much about art, as you can see, but this Rubens fellow
    sounds like he knew what he was doing.  "Free flowing and Happy" sounds
    like the same formula that TV show producers have learned sells well.
    
    An alternative to setting your price low enough to attract those who
    read this conference is to advertise it elsewhere.  System Eyes sells
    stuff on consignment; if you are close to Merrimack NH you might drop
    in and ask for their terms.
        John Sauter

    There is an artists notefile.  Saw one Autocad and one Amiga 2000
    user in there.  Post to that notefile and or classifieds.
    
    P.S. Maybe Video notes too.

    
    RE: 19
    
    The software which simulates an ink pen is called MacCalligraphy.
    If you hold the pen in one spot, the ink starts to spread, and you
    are able to paint with different pen tips.
    
    - Jeff C.
    

    The April issue of "Personal Publishing" contains quite a bit 
    of information about computer art and artists.  Uses, limitations,
    etc, etc.
    
    I only skimmed through it, but it looks very relevant to this 
    discussion.
    
    Steve

re:  Art notesfile:

Art Collecting                  FINALY::ART_COLLECTING                   
Artist Forum                    FINALY::ARTIST_FORUM                     
Cartoon Animation               QARRY::ANIMATION                         
Performing Arts                 CASADM::SHOWBIZ                          
Martial Arts: Karate, Kung Fu   BIMVAX::ARTS                             


John