Digital Fantasy Art - Is It an Advantage or Disadvantage?

Digital fantasy art is becoming more popular, more skilled and more advanced than ever before. Is this relatively new art form worth learning or is it just a pain? Are you better learning it or better staying with traditional mediums?

The answer lies in several areas and depends a lot on you and your outlook to knew technology. Also it depends on whether you see this new medium as an actual art form or simply a technical way of painting by numbers. There are many ways to use this new medium. You can use it as an addition to your traditional art to enhance it in some form. You can use it to create something from scratch. You can use it with the many backgrounds, lighting and models available to you.

The advantages are that it can be used to create true 3D form, something not available in traditional painting mediums which are static forms. The biggest advantages to beginners is it is very forgiving. You can create something and remove it with ease making the creation of something worthwhile much more likely. You can also start with models and backgrounds to aid you in your creation, although you can choose to create your own. This is much more advanced and should be left until you are familiar with all the tools and techniques.

The disadvantages come in part from the advantages. The models can limit your creative process, at least until you have either enough knowledge or enough tools to change them to your liking. The fact that it is very forgiving means that you may over tweak your work or not really know when it is finished or what angles to choose. There are also a lot of avenues to choose from. Just as with traditional mediums you may not know if you want to use oils or watercolour, with digital fantasy art you may not know what equipment to use. As some of this can be expensive to buy it is not a mistake you want to make. Although some people do offer refunds or lite packages which at least gives you the chance to try things out before making a final purchase. Of course you will also need to be proficient on the computer and not worry about using new things. This can be a problem for many people who are at least in part technophobes.

It is possible to create great digital fantasy art with digital technology. Like anything it takes time, patience and a willingness to be open to and to learn new things.