Art and ICT: Connections and possibilities

The computer provides a safe space for the drafting of ideas, visual as well as written. There are certain limitations on this: a mouse is not a good drawing tool, computer screens/printouts have limitations of size, resolution, colour. Nevertheless, if the art activity is appropriate for the ICT medium, it can allow all kinds of new creativity.

 

Computer-appropriate projects

 

Using software to design:

• Pictures which involve manipulation or distortion of shapes. The computer excels at numerical operations, so these kinds of effects are very easy.

• Pictures which involve substitution of colours. The ability to try out twenty different colour-ways for a fabric design in as many seconds.

• Pictures with repetitive elements (tiling). Many programs allow you to select a small area and tile it, sometimes with rotation and altered layout 

• Animations. The computer can reduce the repetitive copying required in animation.

 

Transformations of existing visual material:

• Scanned pictures, from painted/drawn or printed sources. Work can be digitised using a scanner, and so can move in and out of the electronic medium.

• Scanned natural materials: fabrics, leaves. These copyright-free resources can provide many unexpected and rich starting points for graphic work.

• Downloaded pictures from CD ROMs or Internet. Most of the works of major artists are available somewhere on the Internet, and can be used as starting points for your own work. If you are working commercially, copyright clearance will be necessary before you can publish work derived from another artist.

• Digital photographs. Images from the environment¾indoors and outdoors¾can be used immediately on the computer screen.

 

¾all these can be

• Electronically collaged, combined and recombined. Areas may be selected, copied, moved around, rotated, or placed from one image into another.

• Changed in scale or size. Zooming in allows you to work dot by dot, or a very small picture can be ‘blown up’ to reveal unexpected texture, detail or ‘pixellation.’

• Modified in colour or ‘texture.’ The colour of the picture is open to all kinds of changes: inversion, increase in contrast and saturation, substitution of one colour for another, reduction to monochrome, application of artistic effects…

• ‘Painted over’ electronically. The picture can be changed manually using brushes, smudge tools and so on from your graphic program

• Distorted: stretched, warped, re-mapped.

• Tiled. An area can be selected then repeatedly copied. There are several pieces of software designed to create tiled patterns from picture sections

• Animated. Images may be transformed into animations to use in web pages or transfer to video

• Linked with text. Letters and other textual elements may be merged with the graphic to create further designs

• Exchanged over the Internet. This opens possibilities of collaboration on graphic work over any distance, and the gradual development and change of a piece through many different artists

• Published on web-sites. A potential world-wide audience for your graphic work.

• Printed out, developed in other media. The electronic graphic may be a design for a piece in the ‘real world,’ the print out may be cut up, distressed, collaged, enlarged on photocopiers… the computer is only a tool, not a creative artist in its own right.

 

Specific software

• Adobe Photoshop. The market leader for professional graphic work. Very expensive.

• PaintShop Pro. A powerful package available on the University network.

• Microsoft Paint. A basic but useful paint package available on all Windows computers.

• Microsoft Photo Editor. This comes with Microsoft Office, and has a large number of very powerful artistic effects and transformations. Not a paint package.

• Irfan View. A small free utility program, excellent for speedy picture editing: converting, cropping, re-sizing etc.

• Picasa from Google - organise pictures and carry out basic but powerful editing tasks - crop, effects, collage, enhance etc. Free!

 

Children’s Software

 

• Dazzle. An easy-to-use paint program with artistic effects, tiling and much more.

• On-line: Artrage, Bomomo, Mr Picassohead

• Colour Magic. The RM Window-Box paint package. Good for symmetry work.

• KidPix Studio. A CD ROM with all kinds of extraordinary paint, video, animation projects, all with appropriate sounds.

 

Picture file-types

 

Pictures are stored on computers in many different forms, and although it may seem a bit technical it’s as well to know a little about them:

 

Pixel Pictures. Pictures made up of dots (pixels) are very common. Often called Bitmaps (because each ‘bit’ of the picture is ‘mapped’ to a different colour.) When you enlarge one of these pictures too much it breaks down into a pattern of dots, or pixels.

 

On PCs, each file has a suffix, a group of letters after the name which tells the computer what sort of file it is.

Windows bitmap files                            picture.bmp

 

Vector drawings. These pictures are made of lines which the computer ‘colours in’ each time they are drawn. When you enlarge these pictures they retain their integrity. Acorn: Draw files. Publisher clip art is mostly wmf files.

Windows Metafiles                                picture.wmf

Windows enhanced metafiles              picture.emf

 

Compressed pictures. If a picture file is too large it may take hours to get from one computer to another down the narrow ‘pipe’ of your phone line. Pictures of the previous types can be compressed to a very much smaller size, making them much easier to move from one machine to another, or over the Internet. The file is squashed/compressed before sending or storing, and then reconstituted by your graphic software to its full size.

 

JPEG Files                                        picture.jpg

These are highly compressed pictures and have become the most common format on the Internet. They are supported by Acorn, PC and Apple and can be moved seamlessly between platforms. They can be opened using Internet Explorer or Netscape, and will be accepted by all recent word-processors and DTP programs. They do, however, lose quite a bit of fine detail in the process, so should not be used for images which are going to be professionally or photographically printed.

 

TIFF Files                                           picture.tif

‘Tagged Image Format’ files are also common on the Internet. They are not compressed like JPEG files.

 

GIF Files                                            picture.gif

‘Graphic Image Format’ files originally patented by Compuserve. Compresses the information by assigning each colour a specific number. A little picture with very few colours will therefore create a very small file.

 

EPS Files                                          picture.eps

Encapsulated Postscript files are used to transfer accurate font information within a graphic, and are handled by programs such as Pagemaker.