Types of Digital Art

A list of types of visual digital art.

Visual Arts

Vector Art

In vector art, the artist uses scalable graphics vector graphics (e.g. SVG). Essentially, the computer draws the lines based on mathematical equations, and the artist uses tools to control the parameters of the equations.

Pixel Art

In pixel art, the artist changes the color of the pixels one by one, or a small amount of a time. Similar to pointillism in real life.

Although all raster graphics digital art application change colors of pixels, in pixel art the artist wouldn't use a brush that blends large and vague amounts of pixels at once, but instead specify the exact color of exact pixels. Some artists even limit themselves to using only extremely few colors, e.g. draw with just 4 colors, or 8 colors. Pixel art is common in indie games due to its usage in fourth-generation consoles and earlier (Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Playstation, etc).

Note: pixel art doesn't mean just "make pixelated." There are some programs that can automatically generate a pixelated image from a photo you give it, but that's not pixel art, that's just an algorithm.

3D Art

In 3D art, the artist uses a 3D modelling program like Blender to create 3D models, set textures, lighting, and camera position for the program to render a 2D image of the scene.

Voxel Art

Voxel art is a combination of 3D art and pixel art, in which the artist creates 3D models using "3D" pixels called "voxels." The limitations are similar to pixel art: picking colors one by one, no blending brushes, etc., but the artwork is tri-dimesional.

ASCII Art

In ASCII art the artist uses text characters to create an image. The term comes from ASCII, a very old character encoding. To make ASCII art, you normally need a monospace font so that the text characters align in a grid. Normal fonts have varied width per character, so aligning them would be extremely difficult. Most ASCII art is monochrome as it's designed to be published as plain text, however it's possible to create colored ASCII art with the help of specialized applications like REXPaint.

Note: nowadays, most "ASCII art" you find on the Internet wasn't actually created by an artist, but generated automatically by a program that just picks the text characters to match parts of the image's shape and brightness levels. In fact, G'Mic has an ASCII filter, so you can even try this in Krita if you want.

Photo Manipulation

In photo manipulation, artist takes a photo and using a photo editing program, such as Photoshop, Affinity Photo, or GIMP, they change aspects of the photo in a creative way.

Photobashing

In photobashing, the artist merges several photos together and manipulates them, creating a new work that you wouldn't even be able to tell was created from multiple photos.

Image Generators

Programs can generate images, which makes it hard to tell where does "visual art" ends and "image generation" begins. Perhaps an image only looks good because the program generates good images in general without requiring much or any creative input from the human. These things seem to still be categorized as "art" for a lack of a better term.

Fractal Art

In fractal art, a program generates images using algorithms based on fractal math.

It's worth noting that you can create fractals in various ways, and fractal art is often mixed with photo editing to create mixed media artworks.

Another fine fusion of the photographic and the fractal. Don’t those doors, and particularly the circular vent on the wall between them, look like they were part of the 3d fractal imagery? I don’t think it’s easy to fit imagery together like this so seamlessly. It reminds me of paintings I saw in a book called, Mythopoeikon by Patrick Woodroffe years ago. I think this is why Haltenny was asked to provide conceptual artwork for the recent Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol II: he has a real knack for showing how fractal imagery easily blends into natural surroundings and creates a seemingly endless other world. I imagine that’s what inspired the movie folks when they looked at his work: they saw immediately what they could be done with it.

https://orbittrap.ca/?p=5799 (accessed 2024-10-04)

AI Art

In AI art, a program generates images based on a configuration file that was created by another program using machine-learning techniques. This configuration file is also called the "model." AI art is sometimes called "genAI" to avoid calling it an "art."

Note: AI art is absolutely detested by digital artists across the Internet. There are many, many reasons for this, but let's focus on why people don't even want to call it "art," when nobody seems to have have a trouble with fractal "art," as I believe that is very important to why "digital art" is "digital art."

The reason is: fractal art is unique in that it's mathematically precise in the way it generates geometric forms and colors. A human artist would have a lot of trouble even trying to do what a fractal art generator does, and it's not certain whether they would be able to accomplish it at all. On the other hand, "AI art" uses models trained to reproduce human artworks.

The only reason AI art is popular is because the image generators do what you think a human artist would do. They're competing in the same space as human artists despite being a completely different thing. On top of that, "AI artists" often pretend to be real artists, which makes people feel lied to when they find out, and this happens so often that this whole genre has no reputation left to lose.

Something like this wouldn't happen with fractal art, as "fractal artists" would be very honest about the fact that they aren't drawing shapes with brushes, and most people wouldn't assume they are doing that just from looking at a fractal art image.

Are You Actually Kidding Me?: while searching for fractal art examples to put in this very article, I noticed lots of AI generated images created using models created to reproduce fractal art on DeviantArt. All of these images were tagged as "fractal art" making the whole task a lot more frustrating than it should have been. This is why we hate this thing. It's spam. When someone searches for ANYTHING, they NEVER want to see AI art. Only someone specifically searching for AI art wants to see AI art. And yet, AI art appears when you search for all sorts of things it mimics, and in large volume as well. See [How to Remove AI Images from Google Results] for techniques to avoid this plague. (p.s.: this happened AGAIN while I was searching for pixel art!)

Visualizations

It's worth noting that it's also possible to create music-based visualizations in programs like Mocha for Winamp, but I'm not sure if this has a term that includes the word "art" in it.

Games as an Art Medium

Some games allow players to create all sorts of things, and these things appear on the screen, so it's possible to create a visual art with just the game mechanics.

The best example of this is definitely Minecraft. It's a game where you can create anything out of blocks, so it's almost a voxel editor. Actually, it IS a voxel editor, but typically voxel editors for digital art use voxels with a single color, whereas Minecraft has textured voxels. The game was so popular that several voxel-based games were created inspired by it.

A 2D example would be the well-known 2D Minecraft game, Terraria. Although it's harder to create artwork in Terraria, lots of players have created artwork in it. The problem is that with Minecraft, it's a 3D game, so you can just stand far away from an art piece to make it fit inside the screen. If you stand away far enough, you can barely see the texture, so the voxels look like they're solid color blocks. In Terraria, it's a 2D game, so instead of blocks you have tiles, and you can only fit a very small number of tiles on the screen. It becomes a game of picking the best tiles you have available that fit what you're trying to create, not much different from ASCII art.

Many other games allow similar creativity. RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999), for example, has an online community centered around it called New Element where users upload all sorts of creative theme parks.

It's hard to tell where lines can be drawn about artwork in this sense. Some games allow you to take "photos" of the character in-game, and photography is considered an art form in the real world, so wouldn't in-game photography be an art form as well? In that case, wouldn't screenshots be an art form?

Some games allow you to pose characters. Some tools allow you to pose characters of games that don't allow you to do that.

Many people have created videos telling stories based on edited game footage, called Machinimas. I'm pretty sure that's an art.

Regardless, one problem that all of these have is that all artwork created from games is derivative. As the game assets are copyrighted, anything you create and publish based on the game is a copyright infringement. The copyright holder has the legal right to sue you. In fact, I'm pretty sure even streaming gameplay is copyright infringement.

The copyright holder doesn't start suing people left and right because if they did they would end up with bigger problems than the copyright infringement. The players would turn against them. They would lose customers. But everyone draws the line somewhere.

Can you sell artwork you created on Minecraft? Can you sell a screenshot of Breath of the Wild? I'm not a lawyer, so I wouldn't know!