The picture to the left show how the digital layers in Photoshop are organized into the final compostion of the illistration above.

confessions of a bit-map junkie . . .

Years ago, I was a traditional animator painting characters and backgrounds on layers of clear acetate cels. Eventually I would gather up the reams of drawings and shoot them one at a time with my Bolex camera. After weeks of this tedium, I would watch breathlessly as the animated world exploded onto the screen. With mixed emotions of thrill and dread, I watched breathlessly how my two and a half-minute fantasy would reveal itself to the world.

Meanwhile, my daytime job was a technical illustrator and multimedia designer. During the midpoint of my career all of my graphic tools went through a momentous change - evolving from scissors, scraps of paper and leaky airbrushes to a binary world of complex computer technology. The transition from the tactile to the cybernetic world wasn't easy. I had to relearn drawing and design all over again! Then Adobe Photoshop and what then was Metacreation's Painter came along forever changing how one manipulated the bit-map image forever.

Suddenly, I could paint and draw on hundreds of layers to a picture rather than just 3 or 4; I could even blend and alter the opacity of any or all the layers. Both applications were equipped with dozens of digital brushes, scores of special effects and 16 million colors to endlessly manipulate with. And no more airbrushes would ever spit out a glob of paint at my artwork. Last, but not least, I could capture the entire world on film or in drawings and digitize them into the computer. I was so drunk with freedom and excitement, you couldn't imagine all of the mistakes I made - yet I could merrily go back to the 'history palette' and erase whatever I didn't like or hit the 'undo' key. Wouldn't that be a great feature to have in our lives?

Yet I still like to sketch with pencil, pastel or conte crayons on the side of a river or on a street corner. I no longer feel very self-consious as the world passes by. It's has become an automatic routine to create simple gestures that in the end I think are often more compelling and personal than a photograph. Sketching is like a signature - a hieroglyphic gesture of one's instant interpretation that a unique perspection of that moment of time. Like with the storyteller in ancient oral tradition, the emphasis of a tale is how the storyteller embellishs his or hers details leaving the rest to the beholder. I embrace both worlds of tradition and digitization with mixed emotions of enthusiasm and caution. Both seem to be merging from such vastly different worlds. However because of my time and place, I cannot ignore either of them.