More digital studio

I started using the phrase 'digital studio' when I was living in California and had a very small space to work in. I jokingly proposed that measuring my studio in megabytes instead of square feet made it sound more impressive...In general, the digital studio is something I try to stay out of. It's like the wood shop to me - a kind of adjunct space where things get started, but also one where I can fall into obsessive work that may lead me astray from what I really need to pay attention to...

I have been in it lately following up an idea from my Tiger Strikes Asteroid show in 2011. For that show, I made a large multi-panel digital print. I am now working on a large single panel print, and I've learned a few tricks to make it more efficient than the first go-round...

The idea of a digital studio does have a few merits - it is highly portable...carrying a little flash drive to the printer is a lot easier than hauling a canvas this size of this project. And I doubt I would be able to mix the enormous number of subtly varying colors I get by sampling the original file.

I have been working mostly on the file at print size - the size of the eventual output. I can see only a small sliver of the final project on my monitor at a time.

The final version looks like this:

It is double the resolution than my original version:

I could include a lot more of the poem I transcribed in this and I think I prefer seeing more detail.

One really big advantage is that you can revisualize things fast. I layered the two images - something I have done in paintings before - and got an interesting kind of composite image:

overlapping images - you can see the lo-res 'underpainting' (or subext) in the four columns on the right...

The downside of the digital studio is that it is dreadfully dull to do - too much pointing and clicking. All in all, the new version is more than 6,900 data points - each point has to be sampled for color and digitally painted. The work goes fast, if you came up with diversions, but it's tedious even for someone who appreciates work that affords opportunities for the mind to wander.

I'm sure I'm not done with this, but it doesn't feel as much like work as drawing or painting on paper. We'll see how things go as we move toward using the laser cutter in the next digital studio project...