What is digital art? Is it digital photos in digital picture frames? Is it every artistic digital photo? It is digital video shot with a handy cam? Perhaps it is all three.
Technically digital art was born when the first IBM computer was used in conjunction with a digital printer to make a photo out of asterisks. This crude and ugly photo was the first digital picture ever printed. This occurred in the late 1970s. Since then, printers have improved greatly and so has the quality of the medium.

What most normal humans consider art didn’t arrive until computer programs could create a wide array of colors, images and games. This period flourished in the early 1980s. During this period we saw digital dot matrix printers produce almost life-like pictures out of tiny dots. These slow and time consuming behemoths were the cusp of the digital age and they popped out of nowhere. Most people could not afford these expensive and bulky printers that were top of the line for their day. Artists in Soho quickly grabbed onto the concept and began pumping out modern art with digital printers.

In time, digital art progressed into something that we can call the “active medium”. Artists in Soho began to hang flatscreens and use live action in their digital art. These flatscreens showed still life digital photos and live action digital video. This realm of art is just about contemporary with today but with one exception. This type of show was popular in the Soho community among bohemians except that there was something lost in the digital hype. Art has a strong history of personality. There is something lost when microchips do the painting, and these modern exhibits lacked character.

The latest craze in digital art is to recreate the past using a digital filter on modern photos. This branch of art is exploding as the commercial requests for it come pouring in. This branch comes from the fact that these artistic filters can be used to transform average digital photos into elaborate impressionist paintings. This can be done with a standard filter and a unique photo. Commercially this product has found success because when it is paired with an exceptional color printer, it produces what looks like custom paintings on canvas.
Artists can take a basic digital photo and transform it into a “faux masterpiece”. The public simply can’t get enough of this. These digital forgeries are raking in the bucks. When these photos are printed out on canvas, the look like a classic impressionist painting. So digital art has come a long way, and in  the last few decades, it went commercial!

thnaks you to the respective artists for their worksAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Chloe Calc

Chloe Calc is a fully trained CG artist with a full background in After Effects , Maya, and Flash from various colleges around the World including Washington , London and Paris. Also does a lot of copywriting, marketing, and meeting planning.