Tegaki E is a blog website where all the entries and comments are hand-written. The original website is Tegaki, and it's in Japanese. Thus, the E in Tegaki E stands for English, since it is mostly English speakers.
What's great about this website is that the canvas, or applet, has only pre-selected colours and opacities. It used to be that there were no opacities, and some people still draw that way, however, the restrictions that 100% opacity provides seem to be beneficial to users. I think this is because it forces them to gauge the value of the colour without being able to alter it. The user has to think about which colors, not shades, will work together to create the illusion of lighting, or shadows, of a certain colour. So what is more effort definitley helps the user develop their art.
It's true with everything, though. More effort, more time and more thought will always, always make a better product.
You can use programmes like photoshop, which has an abundance of tools and effects and brushes and even transforming ability, or you could use Tegaki, which has virtually no special features, as well as only one layer. It seems like a done deal, obviously you'd use photoshop. But quite a few users, primarily young ones like myself, do use Tegaki instead of or as well as expensive drawing and effects programmes like photoshop.
I asked the question why, but as soon as I'd asked myself the answer became apparant. It's because every artist is given the same slate, and each making what they will of it is something to behold. You can see what someone's drawn and see how they drew it, which tools they used, because there are so few tools. And people are able to make magnificent pictures using just patience and practice. Skill comes with these things. If you can draw with Tegaki, then using other programmes is infinitley easier. It's almost like a skillbuilding tool, for me.
I don't want to go into a career involving visual arts and such, but to draw on Tegaki and improve my drawing skills is a very fun hobby and it brings me great joy. I wanted to blog about it to exemplify my thoughts on a website full of artists I admire and tools I both struggle with and appreciate.
http://www.unowen.net/tegaki/
Here's the front page. The drawings you see there have been voted on by other users and then approved by mods, so it's probably the best of what people draw on Tegaki.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
There are artists who've written passionately defensive essays about why their favorite type of pencil is the absolute greatest pencil and all these new-fangled hippy-dippy mechanical pencils with stupid new complicated features can't ever recreate the simpler pencil's magic.
ReplyDeleteYou've just written such an essay, only it's about software. This makes an interesting statement about modern art, wouldn't you say?
It's true that I've decided to analyze something totally different from what would have been written as little as 20 years ago. Being young and on the internet, I have access to both social and art sharing websites, and this one happens to be both. Draw something, talk about it in the same post, have people reply with more drawings. What would be better? It has the charm of a written letter with the convenience of an eMail. Lots of people enjoy this kind of thing, too. It probably has something to do with people my age being digital natives.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if people are doing this newfangled technology to express themselves, obviously someone's going to accuse it of requiring less talent or something. People like to get defensive. And not everything new is better, as a fact.
So, I'm not saying it's better than any way to draw, really... only that it's something I'm happy to experience.