Introduction - An Introduction to Computer Graphics for Artists - page 6

Fig. 1.5 On left , Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet 1872 (Copyright free, image is in the pub-
lic domain). The use of unblended bright color in Impressionist paintings led to Pointillism, a way
of painting that mimicked the later appearance of the pixel in computer graphics ( right )

1.4 Artists and Expertise

Knowledge of a subject is one of the things that make the difference between a novice
and an expert (Alexander 2003 ). A novice mechanic may look under the hood of a car
and see a number of undifferentiated blackened metal objects. An expert mechanic
sees an engine, gaskets, spark plugs, hoses, and other things he can identify, knows
the purpose of, and can assemble himself if necessary. For a computer graphics
artist, the difference between a true expert and a novice is that the novice has not yet
practiced their powers of observation, nor made signifi cant efforts to apply their
observations in fi nished work. Knowledge of specifi c applications is secondary to
practice and understanding (King et al. 2008 ). This means that success as an artist,
whether a traditional artist or a CG artist, begins with practicing one's observation
skills. This can be done in many ways, without reference to CG tools.

1.5 Technical Contributions of Artists

Without the work of pointillist artists like George Seurat and Henri-Edmund Cross,
or the scientist writers who inspired them, like Ogden Rood and M.E. Chevreul
(Birren 1976 ; Gage 1987 ) we might never have seen what we now recognize as 3D
computer graphics. What these artists and scientists discovered was that if they broke
a color into its primary components, a full spectrum of visible colors could be cre-
ated. Artists expanded on this observation by making hundreds of paintings, each of
which tested the limits of what came to be known as Pointillism, a style of painting
using nothing but brightly colored dots, or points. These paintings became the basis
for pixel-based graphics (Fig. 1.5 ). Without a method to make a two-dimensional