Steve Pitzel

What are digital skills and why should you care about them? You're an artist, right? Well, if you are and you are reading this from the AWN Web site, you're already tuned into digital skills in a big way whether or not you're aware of them.

The truth is, to be an artist today and get paid for it, a working knowledge of computers-what they can and can't do for you, and how to nudge more out of them than they're actually built to do-is a necessity. That goes double for the software that talks to you, obeys and disobeys you, and provides both the precise results and just as importantly, all those happy mistakes that spawn the magic and, yes, the fun of the digital workflow.

But it's not just about the workflow. It's also about communication: how you find what you need, how you network and connect. That and understanding that eschewing technology for the sake of artistic purity can be professionally fatal.

Even professional productions with big money and all sorts of folks checking everyone’s work can be victimized by poor up-front planning.  Don’t make the same mistake on your animation demos! Plan ahead, plan well, and stick to that plan.

I remember texturing a character who wore jeans. I’ll never forget the worn-denim masterpiece I’d spent way too long tweaking in Photoshop*. You could see every frayed thread on those western-stitched pockets. You could feel the comfy, broken-in fit. It certainly looked cool in my modeling viewport; it was even very convincing when I coaxed my little model through a walk cycle. So imagine my surprise when the character’s legs showed up completely black in the game engine.

If the NFL lock-out actually happens and we really have no pro-football next fall, don’t worry-there is a new spectator sport that is a lot cooler to watch, less dangerous, and even more instructive from an artist's standpoint: speed painting.

Okay, so maybe it isn't really a full-blown sport, but if the proliferation of these videos of digital artwork screen-captured during the creation process is any indication, it's fast becoming a popular spectator event in any case.

I was stunned when I heard an engineer gleefully utter that proclamation. I wasn’t surprised by the sentiment; I know that a certain amount of friction exists between the polar worlds of artists and engineers - mostly, I believe, from the lack of a common language. But is that statement true?

During the first Dark Ages, folks living in the shadow of the Roman Aqueduct said, “What the heck is that thing?” They yanked stones from it to build their huts, it became a landmark, but as far as they knew, IT was created by wizards—or maybe the more advanced thought aliens were responsible. The records of what IT was, and how and why IT was built were either lost, destroyed, or irretrievable through the methods of the day.

It’s not easy being a professional artist. Just being an artist at all isn’t easy. It’s a challenge from the moment you experience that compulsion to draw or sculpt something or make up a song. You’re not quite like everyone else. You’re not looking for “something to do” - you’re looking for the time to do it, the means to do it, or someone to show you how to do it.

No matter how much you think you need a “normal life,” you really don’t have time for one - the earlier you recognize that, the better off you’ll be. You must have the courage to say “I need to do this” and then let the chips fall as they may.

Except for “most” of the actors, there is very little in modern advertising that isn’t the product of long hours of software application coding (much of that done by my good friends in the labyrinthine folds and levels of Autodesk), followed by longer hours of someone pushing a mouse or waving a stylus at some digital display. I’m probably not going to lose too many artists when I say that even some of the people, the “folks” we see in advertising, are not…quite…real. Yes, watching an automobile commercial these days and believing what you see is sort of like being plugged into the Matrix.

Look at a few horror films from the ‘50s and ‘60s, and you’ll see how well developed that ability to suspend disbelief and roll with it was at one point. All it took was a little latex and a screaming heroine to set the mood. But over the decades we’ve created a very, very different film world. Like antibiotics, digital effects have been overused as a salve to “cure” a bad story; the nasty side effect is that they have left disbelief extremely resistant to suspension.

I’d be the last person to suggest we should be happy with blatantly bad effects. What I’m  asking is: are we working hard enough to understand the codes and contexts that trigger suspension of disbelief in our audience?