- December 22, 2022
- Posted by: Piers Midwinter
- Categories:
I have used digital artworks to promote my own arts festivals, create contracts for my own company, create artworks, plan paintings, and so on. Most of these digital artworks are on the Saatchi Online Gallery.
The Raw Arts Festival (RAF) 2004 and RAF 2005 were two of the biggest and best exhibitions of non-mainstream art mounted in Central London. The RAF 2006 and RAF 2007 were co-organized with the New York Arts Magazine. RAF 2008 was held in L.A. My Raw Arts Festivals website details these more fully.
Between April 1st, 2014, and June 30th, 2019, I ran my own company/English Language School in Opole in Poland. I had employment contracts with a German University, an IT company, corporations, Private schools, directors, language schools, and private students. In July 2019, I moved to Vietnam. I used Art and ICT skills to gain business…
I have used created posters to advertise my website, political cartoons against the madness of Brexit, artworks about Vietnam, plan complex paintings, etc. Please contact me for more information about my digital artwork or look at my paintings portfolio.
Digital artwork – Bitmap vs vectors
A bitmap (also called “raster”) graphic is created from rows of different colored pixels that together form an image. In their simplest form, bitmaps have only two colors, with each pixel being either black or white. With increasing complexity, an image can include more colors; photograph-quality images may have millions.
Examples of bitmap graphic formats include GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, XBM, BMP, and PCX as well as bitmap (i.e., screen) fonts. The image displayed on a computer monitor is also a bitmap, as are the outputs of printers, scanners, and similar devices. They are created using paint programs like Adobe Photoshop.
Vector (also known as “object-oriented”) graphics are constructed using mathematical formulas describing shapes, colors, and placement. Rather than a grid of pixels, a vector graphic consists of shapes, curves, lines, and text which together make a picture. While a bitmap image contains information about the color of each pixel, a vector graphic contains instructions about where to place each of the components.
It is even possible to embed a bitmap graphic within a vector graphic, which is how vector-bitmap hybrid graphics work. It is not possible, however, to embed vector information within a bitmap. Examples of vector graphic formats are PICT, EPS, and WMF as well as PostScript and TrueType fonts. These are created with GIS and CAD applications as well as drawing programs like FreeHand.
As described below, bitmap and vector graphics both have their strengths and weaknesses:
- In general, a bitmap graphic is much larger than a similar vector graphic.
- Bitmap graphics are affected by resolution. If you enlarge a bitmap graphic, it will look jagged. When shrunk, its features become indistinct and fuzzy. This does not happen with vector graphics as their shapes are redrawn to compensate for changes in resolution.
- Altering vector graphics is easy because the shapes within them can be ungrouped and edited individually. However, vector graphics are difficult to modify or even display when they are not opened in programs that understand their rendering languages. For example, while many Mac OS drawing programs easily display and edit PICT files, few are able to do anything at all with WMF files. Most paint applications, however, are capable of opening many different kinds of bitmap graphic formats.
- You can easily convert one kind of bitmap file into another. You can also convert a vector graphic into a bitmap. However, it is very difficult to convert a bitmap graphic into a true vector graphic. It is even difficult to convert one kind of vector graphic into another (e.g., PICT to WMF).
- Vector graphics are not appropriate for complex images (e.g., digitized photographs).
Once you understand these ideas, creating digital artwork is easy. Digital artwork includes GIF animations, Logos, website headers, and many other graphics. Digital artwork can also be used to plan complex paintings. If you are interested in digital artwork, do contact me.
