Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)
coolandcollected.com
coolandcollected.com
I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.
This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.
It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.
Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.
Some anecdata:
Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.
I might be talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure we've "known" for centuries that imperfection has an enormous place in art. Before computers, before photography.
The old films with model special effects they have a ton of life to them, more natural camera angles.
I practice black and white photography, for example. So much of what I see of it now looks like the overdone, over-edited forced perfection of style derived from the gritty beauty of much more crudely interesting monochromes of decades past.
Popsongs today sound so nice but also so forgetable.
I think this is why 80s and 90s pop is still so popular.
Probably explains why it works much better for him than for others: he used it as an instrument, not as a crutch to hide a lack of singing skills.
Music from the 80s/90s that is popular today has stood the test of time; there's a lot more music from these decades that we don't hear today & is not popular. We've also heard those songs a lot more times than contemporary music.
Old school animation has the same quality. It's all hand drawn so not quite as exact. It looks fantastic. You wouldn't really even call it flawed, just less formulaic.
I guess that makes me think "how could we model that with computers?" I mean we could make a gradient less smooth. We could add different sorts of noise. It sounds quite complicated but in theory a computer could do this. Practically speaking it may never be worth trying to implement. Kind of a 80/20 issue. That is, you could do a ton of extra work to bump the quality a bit but people are already pretty happy with it so why bother?
--
Aside: I was more into painting AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) miniatures. I still have most of my books and dice. My miniatures may be around here somewhere too, but I have 3 generations of stuff to go through to find it. I want less screen time though and plan to pick up some paints and miniatures soon.
Does anyone else (maybe over 40 yo) see the FarCry 3 logo and not recognize it as an homage to the 80s, but as a clear example of the synthwave style, which was popular when the game came out?
The pink, blue, purple color scheme emblematic of synthwave. From the 80s examples given, we don't see any combination of "chrome" + grid. There's an added scanline effect that isn't visible in the period examples (why would we think of scanlines in the 80s?), and the background lacks the gradients we especially see in the Heavy Metal and Yars' Revenge examples.
I don't think so. I used to do a lot of airbrushing, in the 1980s. I even had one of these[0].
I don't miss them at all. They were a huge pain in the ass.
[0] https://paulbudzik.com/tools-techniques/Airbrushing/paasche-...
I also probably inhaled a lot of toxic paint. The respirators never seemed to work that well, as I would pick some really cool-looking boogers from my nose.
Jars of Magic Color were adorable objects, though, all saturated and shiny with their little rubber nipples on top.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230530003133/https://metalmaga...
Outside of the occasional software pirate, nobody in the US heard of them until they'd become Rare and been eaten by Nintendo.
What an incredibly talented family!
I read many a crappy sci-fi novel because of his amazing cover art!
>Artwork costs money
I'm a big fan of 60s-to-80s graphic design, including posters, album covers, and game art. Some of it is kitschy and terrible, but the best has a dynamism and enthusiasm that is missing today. It captures and fires up the imagination and literally colours outside the lines. As a metaphor using a device with hard edges and a limited toolset discourages you from doing that.
https://indieground.net/blog/the-20-best-videogame-cover-fro...
And now I bet you're immediately thinking of arguments about all the time you've invested in developing an eye for composition and a sense of when that precise interesting moment is about to happen and all the darkroom techniques and film speeds and ISOs and and and... now you know how I feel about what you just said.
----
This argument against digital work was old back in 2003 when I was having it on Deviantart's forums. I've been drawing regularly for a half a century; it's been my day job for half that and I have many clients who are absolutely delighted to pay me to use my skills to interpret their ideas in my own unique way. They'll have an idea and come to me in particular because they think I will knock it out of the park, and usually their responses to the final work indicates I did. I get similar sentiments from my fans on my personal work. But hey, think whatever makes you feel good about where your own craft is going, sweetheart.
First, fair counterpoint to my dismissive comment. I was referring more to an aesthetic notion of digital art creating a cheapening effect by being too perfect compared to things like the manually air brushed works in the original link. That's just an aesthetic preference though. You making the effort at creating your digital works shouldn't be dismissed as cheap or as not being art though. It's an effort of its own, but through a different medium, so, sorry if it came across wrong.
With that said, in case you were being serious in what you said about photography,
I invite you to go look a the photography of recognized masters of its practice, and consider the effort many of them have made to perfect their compositions, their eye for an interesting shot, capturing those shots (often at considerable personal risk of harm) and the patience they needed for both, and then compare that to the vast reams of photos by most people, and then tell me again that there's no art to it. If you claim it requires no effort, then you haven't done it to any worthwhile degree and hae no clue about what you're saying.
To hear him tell it, it was not particularly glamorous, and hours of fastidious airbrushing to get huge, smooth gradient backgrounds was an RSI-inducer.
I'm pretty sure we can do a better digital emulation of an airbrush than what's currently in paint programs, it just needs more of the actual physics and pigments to be modelled. We've gotten a bit stuck on the RGB raster graphics paradigm and only a few programs are really doing the work to break away from it.
https://www.leemorganartworx.co.uk/Images/Custom%20Work/Moto...