Digital Prints

As with other painting programs, Studio Artist is a good companion to Photoshop. Hawaii
artist Diana Jeon likes to start an image in Photoshop, bring it into Studio Artist to add
different painted or sketched effects, and then wrap it all up back in Photoshop for final
printing.
CorelDRAW/PhotoPaint: Primarily used as an illustration/page-layout program,
CorelDRAW is now packaged with Corel PhotoPaint (for image editing and painting)
and R.A.V.E. (for creating animations and vector effects for the Web) into the
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. While originally a dual-platform application, Version 12 of
the Graphics Suite is for Windows only.
Digital artist Carol Pentleton, who also runs the online gallery The Digital Artist, uses
CorelDRAW exclusively in the creation of her images. She loves the flexibility, the transparency
of use, and the quality of the tools, and her favorite feature is the infinite mutability
of fills she can get with the program. Pentleton outputs her images to both IRIS and
a proprietary digital-oil-on-canvas printing process. “I love the color saturation and the
smoothness of the transitions of the prints,” she says.
Illustrator and Freehand: I put Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand in the same
grouping because they often trade places on most artists’ lists for best vector-based, drawing
or illustration program (CorelDRAW is the other contender). Digital artists have found
good uses for vector-based drawing programs, using them in combination with other software.
New York artist Howard Berdach works this way by starting off his images as shapes
in Freehand. Brought into Photoshop, the elements are colorized, layered, and then layered
some more (see Figure 3.16). “When my images are ‘done,’ they’re often just starting
points to the next version,” he says. Printed output is to Epson, Roland, and IRIS
wide-format inkjet printers.
Chapter 3 ■ Creating and Processing the Image 99
Figure 3.16 Howard Berdach’s
Sonic Color Loom, created in Freehand
and Photoshop.
© 1998-2004 Howard Berdach
www.howardberdach.com