Digital - blog topic 1

For the first digital art lesson, we tackled the topic of photo-bashing, and whether or not it was ethical to use as an artist. I think that photo-bashing is an efficient and acceptable form of concepting, but it is difficult to measure how much of a person's work can be used in your own. Using small details from a photo is ideal as you can take the smaller more unusual elements and use it to add detail by blending it into your own work, such as pieces of wiring or grating for a sci-fi project, taken from a photo of a plane interior. It is however, easy to abuse the power of photo-bashing, for example using an entire photo for a backdrop in a digital painting with very little alteration.



I also feel that photo-bashing, whilst it is developing its own sense of an art style identity, can cause a digital artist to lose their own painting style and limit their painting skill. Many photo-bashed pieces of work tend to look similarly photorealistic, and lose the original charm of an individual art style. However, it can be argued that some artists have taken a hold of photo-bashing and have integrated it into their own style, and it is even being parodied by some artists, such as Mr. Concept Art. These parodies are being made as a reaction to the lack of creativity and skill of some photobashing artists, who appear to entirely rip off images from other sources without altering them much at all. Although photo-bashing does not seem to have its own manifesto as other art movements do, it has encouraged reactionary artwork to combat and parody the idea of photo-bashing.

'The Last of Us' concept By John Sweeny

 Soldier design, by Mr. Concept Art - a parody of photobashing