categorizations
Feb. 8th, 2007 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashWhat is the medium of "vector art"?
It's a definition entirely about the representation. It's art that the computer stores as a series of paths to draw. Draw from here to here here with a 5-point-wide red line. Draw this shape here and fill it with green.
One advantage of this is the fact that usually you can blow it up to the size of a billboard much more easily than something you did in pixels. This is a quality of the medium and a reason to use it, not an invariable feature. Not now, when more and more programs offer ways to munge it up and include texture. Not ever - one of the first articles I read on Illustrator, years before I used it myself, was on including snippets of tinted bitmap to create texture.
It is not about a particular look. Flat colors and super-smooth gradients come easily but they are not the be-all and end-all of the medium. I'm finding more and more that texture comes pretty easily too, when I want it. And, most importantly, it is not about the exclusion of all bitmap elements as undoctrinaire, non-vector, and cheating.
"Draw this shape here, fill it with green, then apply a mezzotint filter to it and blur the edges" is just as much a vector file as anything else. Eliminating this from your definition of what "vector art" is is like saying you can't do impasto painting with acrylics and still call it "acrylic painting" because it's starting to include sculptural elements.
Memo to self: explore Lineform. Core Graphics filters + vector art could be a lot of fun, if they didn't fuck up the basics. Unfortunately the pen tool is painfully slow when there's a bitmap image being displayed and it keeps on resetting to no fill, black outline after every path I draw. A shame; I really like how it handles the bitmap filters in a resolution-independent way.
It's a definition entirely about the representation. It's art that the computer stores as a series of paths to draw. Draw from here to here here with a 5-point-wide red line. Draw this shape here and fill it with green.
One advantage of this is the fact that usually you can blow it up to the size of a billboard much more easily than something you did in pixels. This is a quality of the medium and a reason to use it, not an invariable feature. Not now, when more and more programs offer ways to munge it up and include texture. Not ever - one of the first articles I read on Illustrator, years before I used it myself, was on including snippets of tinted bitmap to create texture.
It is not about a particular look. Flat colors and super-smooth gradients come easily but they are not the be-all and end-all of the medium. I'm finding more and more that texture comes pretty easily too, when I want it. And, most importantly, it is not about the exclusion of all bitmap elements as undoctrinaire, non-vector, and cheating.
"Draw this shape here, fill it with green, then apply a mezzotint filter to it and blur the edges" is just as much a vector file as anything else. Eliminating this from your definition of what "vector art" is is like saying you can't do impasto painting with acrylics and still call it "acrylic painting" because it's starting to include sculptural elements.
Memo to self: explore Lineform. Core Graphics filters + vector art could be a lot of fun, if they didn't fuck up the basics. Unfortunately the pen tool is painfully slow when there's a bitmap image being displayed and it keeps on resetting to no fill, black outline after every path I draw. A shame; I really like how it handles the bitmap filters in a resolution-independent way.