"In my subconscious mind, drawing with a mouse is no different from painting with a pen or a oil painting stick. This medium makes it possible for me to operate my computer faster, better, and cheaper."
----From August (English) Angus Heland's Brush and Mouse Illustrator Nick Hingis said when visiting Pengtaglena Design Co., Ltd., August 1999.
Foreword
I like the computer, sitting in front of a flashing screen, with a clever mouse between the square, to express their own ideas, this is a very pleasant thing. All this must be attributed to the development of science and technology. Digital application is indeed a very magical thing. My life has also been changed a lot. Everything in front of me was simply unthinkable to me a few years ago (I was very passionate about the art of painting a few years ago and I was intoxicated, let alone using a computer), but all this was so real. . At that time, I still wanted to wait until I had the money to make any art. I studied design for four years in college. I like painting more and more like designing. In my eyes, I design more than drawing, and I find a combination of the two - illustration design.
Shi Tao, a well-known Chinese landscape painter in the Qing Dynasty, once said: "When ink is used, it should be replaced at any time." In the design of a wide range of applications today, design should also follow the times. The renewal of technology emerges in an endless stream, changes in thinking are changing rapidly, and it has a huge impact on all aspects of modern life. Of course, design has inevitably been greatly affected.
However, with the popularity of computers and the improvement of the application level, there are more and more expression techniques and means for illustration designs that are very personalized. As a traditional design application method, illustration design has undergone a great impact, but also absorbed the essence of modern technology, which has renewed vitality. In the digital world today, illustration design as a combination of painting and design in the digital era today, how far it can go, is a question worthy of our consideration.
Art needs personality, and design also needs personality. In this digital era of individuality, more and more designs need to have individuality. With the widespread use of computers and various digital devices in the field of design, only personalized design works can gain a foothold in the industry and can be respected in the industry to gain artistic value. Especially in today's information age, with the change of the rhythm of life and the development of information visualization, digital design is eroding every corner of life. Illustration design on the edge of art and design is not an unfamiliar area for us. In recent years, illustrations have frequently appeared on books, magazines, fashion shows, advertisements, music, and television screens. And more and more applications have been applied to all walks of life. Illustration design has gradually become more and more important in the history of human information dissemination.
Illustrations belong to the category of "Visual Communication Design" in the "mass communication" field. It is a branch of art design. The most basic meaning is "the picture inserted in the middle of the text to help explain the contents. In ancient China, because of the different forms of illustrations, the names are different. For example, the volume painting in the Song and Yuan dynasties is the "embroidered image" and the chapter back story The English word for the illustration is "full picture." The English word for the illustration is often called illustration. Illumination is referred to in medieval Bible manuscripts as decorative words and patterns in the Bible or prayer text. Illumination is a lim-limm from the English Saxon language. (Italian idea) and the French word luminer (a means of giving glory and light). The other English word of the illustration is icon.icon means an icon in a religious book. Modern illustrations are visual images, Demonstrating the concept of a word or illustrating the passage of events.Modern illustrations are narrowly defined and broadly defined.Narrowly defined illustration concepts refer to illustrations, which are paintings used for argumentation and explanation;and the broad conception of illustration refers to vision that can be used as illustration and argumentation. Materials, such as illustrations, charts, photography, etc. The discussion in this article is based on a broad concept.
Since ancient times, illustrations have been cited by the religion, literature, dictionaries, and illustrated books as an assistant to the text, and the specific contents of the text have been given through drawings and illustrations. At the time of the invention of printing, people made use of black and white line drawing techniques in stone or wood to make illustrations, and there appeared a small amount of printed materials, such as the earliest Chinese unearthed in Qianfodong Cave in Dunhuang, Gansu Province in 868 AD. The illustrations in the exquisite "Diamond Sutra" scroll are engraved, and in the European Dark Age, manuscripts, miniatures, and oil paintings that were circulated among the priests, and the prints that appeared at the same time, also showed a large number of hand-drawn pictures.
However, the history of using text as a means of communication has been long. After the invention of the aluminum alloy letterpress printing and fatty ink invented by the German Gutenberg in the 15th century, the quality and speed of printing have been greatly improved, and a large number of books have begun to spread. Book dissemination has become a major channel of communication. So the illustration has been widely promoted. Since then, the application of illustrations has become the mainstream of modern visual communication. At this time, books were the main medium for using illustrations.
In the eighteenth-century France, the use of graphic illustrations was also extremely popular. However, with the advent of woodblock printing in the Ming and Qing Dynasties and the appearance of colored stone paintings in the 19th century, some of the illustrations were applied in the design of posters. In addition, nineteenth-century newspapers with drawings in Britain are also extremely popular. In the second half of the 19th century, there were children's picture books such as Walter Grane and Kelly Greenevy in the United Kingdom. Publications were generally illustrated rather than text. appear. In addition, at the end of the 19th century, many published art magazines also paid great attention to the view and illustrations. Therefore, newspapers and magazines have become the best medium for illustrations. And outdoor billboards, posters, trademark posters, packaging boxes, product brochures, etc., all use advertising illustrations and make visual communication methods established.
After the advent of photography technology, illustration design was gradually replaced by photographs. The art of painting began to be abstracted. Whether it was composition or technique, it added charm, symbolism, or customary charm or appearance of expression content, and pursued the reproducibility of color. , pay attention to personality performance. This has led to the appearance of great influences on modern painting, such as impressionism, symbolism, and three-dimensional school of modern art. It also has a huge impact on illustrations, and illustrations are also more diverse in form. Just like the illustration drawn by the surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) for "Don Quixote", it fully expresses the imagination and expressive power of the extraordinary masters of modern painting. In addition, due to the diversification of painting materials, the development of techniques such as single stencil printing, oil painting, watercolor, and acrylic techniques has emerged.
With the innovation of modern printing technology and the appearance of computers, the design skills and methods have been greatly improved. The use of modern laser imagesetters replaces the manual platemaking process, which makes a large number of images appear in the design. The use of computers speeds up the dissemination of information, while illustrators still remain in traditional and modern easel paintings. Therefore, during much of the early 1990s, the illustrations were in a state of malaise and precariousness. With the expansion of the commercial market, its long-time customer design and advertising departments have become even cheaper and their choices have become more liberal. As the computer speeds up there are also software upgrades, including Freehand, Photoshop and
Illustrator and many other image processing software providers, designers and art directors seem to think that they can use their computers to create their own images. This situation has been exacerbated by the fact that people have been able to extensively access the large amount of software for storing good pictures provided by the market and the proliferation of pirated laser discs (such as Photo disk photo discs). They are flooded with arbitrarily editable image shapes that can be manipulated, and there is a proliferation of "fashionable" printed books. Therefore, in the 1990s traditional illustrations have become more and more inopportune and often viewed as local. It is expensive, uneditable, and aesthetically bizarre, and it shows a zeitgeist of "copying and photographing."
The images of numerous descriptive texts are not from the hands of the traditionally trained illustrators. Instead, the cumbersome, eye-catching graphics are the results of those graphic designers working with Photoshop image processing software all day long. Of course, we must also recognize the artistic value of its existence. However, indulging in the patchwork of graphics all the time, designers and illustrators are obviously out of control of the graphic design, so the artistic charm of the illustrations is as forgotten as the quaint and interesting ancient ruins.
The rapid development of science and technology in the mid-1990s and the development of the telecommunications industry have led to the massive dissemination of animation in Japan and the United States. So far I still clearly remember the "Transformers", "Superman", "Astro Boy," "Macross", "Cat and Mouse" and other classic animation. The excellent animated images of these designs are still fresh in their memory. The popularity of video games has spread from street simulators to home-use game consoles, home-use game consoles from 8-bit to 16-bit machines to Play-station to the current development of Play-station 2, X-Box, and various types. The development of computer games, RGB, role-playing, real-time strategy, military flag type, etc., the appearance of a large number of original paintings (styling) and small scene illustrations have begun to be applied to non-static animation designs.
In the visual communication field, when computer graphics flooded the public, some graphic designers recognized the enormous influence of computers on design and rethought the way to solve visual problems. "In the awakening of the digital revolution, the illustrations drawn with paint and ink seem to have lost the soil of survival relative to the flourishing of art scraping with Photoshop software. For those who still work in the traditional way, for painting The discussion on the abandonment of craftsmanship is a matter of no delay."
Illustrator Darryl Luis told the AOI workshop in November 1999:
With the awakening of illustration design in Europe and America and the emergence of a large amount of information, design increasingly requires visual simplification and technological innovation, and the development of technology and the popularity of computers have led digital designers to apply digital technologies widely in illustration design. Apply and make digital illustration design an important role and role in its creation. As the boundaries between "pure art" and "commercial design" become more and more blurred, the art of illustrators fills the gap between graphic design and art, and the tools used are becoming more and more digitized. As a result of the simplification, the new illustrations have gained unique visual impact and artistic connotation, so that the combination of technology and imagination has reached a height that no one had before.
Painting with the mouse not only reflects the artist's ability to create images, but also makes the illustrations renewed in the once painful field of employment, and from an aesthetic point of view, it has concise, reproducible attributes because the more simple the image, the more The greater the information carried, the broader the imagination for the public, so not only in the graphic design industry, but also in the entire media community is reflecting on this increasingly popular style. As illustrator Nick Hingis commented:
"In my subconscious mind, drawing with a mouse is no different from painting with a pen or a oil painting stick. This medium makes it possible for me to operate my computer faster, better, and cheaper."
First, digital devices and software solve the ever-changing needs of illustrators' thinking.
The illustrator Christian Russell thinks: "I have discovered a bright and clean world, a real and beautiful clarity. I can recolor and reconstruct the picture in an instant. In short, resize and cut in any way I want. Image: I am more and more interested in the almost purely digitized production of such all-embracing elements of painting, cutting and pasting."
Digital devices and software make use of the convenience of modern technology to maximize the designer's uncertainty in the transformation of thinking.
For example these