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Luckytime
If you're a fan of your own work, then you'll be fine ~ Start small. If you can't, then start smaller ~ If you don't love what you put out, don't expect anyone else to

Age 32, Male

Process Improvement

AAS Mechanical Engineering

North Carolina

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What Makes Art Unique?

Posted by Luckytime - January 20th, 2016


The term "Art" covers a wide range of media, but for the purposes of this post I use it to refer to illustrations. So what can art do that other media can't? How can it be used most effectively and how does the nature of art make it unique?


Illustrations use visual elements, sure, but so do sculpture and film. This means that anything that can be illustrated can also be physically constructed or be a frame in a movie. If you put them side by side, illustrations may seem limiting when they're up against the extra dimensions of physical space or the added context offered by the motion of an animation. Where do illustrations have a leg up on these two?

They don't demand your time.

When you want to communicate something very rapidly the most efficient way isn't to build a replica or animate a cartoon. Even rough drafts using those mediums take hours to complete. As demonstrated by the classic game Pictionary, you can transfer a number of ideas into a viewer's head in a short amount of time using simple lines.


2955357_145328000163_Pictionary1.jpg


Time is a valuable asset. Artists trying to pay their bills probably won't start by animating or modeling, those things require too much time and aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. In the face of this reality, illustration is understandably the safer option, and it's why you see so much more of it than any other type of visual medium.

But don't fret! Not everything about art is the result of a system that threw creatives overboard in favor of machines that churn out content on a regular interval. Some people just enjoy illustrating! :D When you get to a certain level of proficiency at art, you can use the time saved by illustrating to employ a technique in the art world that I call "rendering". To render your work means to enhance the visual fidelity by adding details, defining forms, or expanding the lightmap. Of course, 3-D assets and animations can be rendered as well, but those require enough time alone that most professional triple-A games and movies don't look as good as a masterful illustration.

Of course there are exceptions but they are few and far between. Any type of visual media can be highly rendered with enough time, money, and soulless manpower. Projects that would take one person a lifetime to complete can be accomplished in a relatively short time using "teams" to divide the workload. The difference between a highly rendered illustration and anything else is that it only takes one person and won't reflect a number of influences from different hands working on the project. In this way, illustration can be used to represent a distilled viewpoint of one person in a reasonable timeframe.

Speaking of time, art can also be consumed quickly. To understand a movie you must watch the whole thing. To see a 3-D model you need to rotate it. To understand a picture you simply need to look at the single frame it's represented in. Since a drawing is the most basic form of art, you can take all sorts of shortcuts when creating it. Many things can be implied like motion, form, space, mood, or lighting without explicitly defining them. Vast universes can be created rapidly by only tapping into the imagination of the viewer.

So to summarize, art can communicate ideas quickly and effectively and doesn't require a large time investment which makes it ideal for solo creators who have a vision they want share... with this line of thinking, it doesn't really make any sense to spend too much time rendering if you're focusing on art as a profession. Rendering is a luxury afforded to those that are successful enough to escape the system and only holds you back if you're just starting out.


I literally just taught myself something... what do you think about all this? Did you enjoy the read? Let me know!


Comments

Is music art

Absolutely!

As long as it's the true expression of one's creativity,it's art.

This wasn't really asking "what is art?", more "what are the advantages of this one specific avenue of art?".

I was more of answering the fella below,sorry about that,heh.If you ask me,the difference between illustrated art and media art is the same as a handwritten letter and one being typed out.It creates that genuine feeling when you look at something handmade,it makes you think of the amount of time and effort the person has put into the work.I am not saying anything about people who used the 'other' ways because they are adapting to the changing world by using a more modern way and they also put in a lot of effort and time in their work too.All I am saying is that sometimes,there will be that strange feeling when you look at artworks which are made differently.