Create Your Own Computer Art - Part 1: The Software

People keep asking me about the software and/or techniques I use when creating GospelGifs and other Christian or family-friendly graphics, so I thought I would make this information available.   I hope this information will prove helpful to you.  I will provide you with more information than most aspiring computer artists really need or want, but I've learned that it's faster to tell the whole story up front, allowing you to take and use whatever you wish.

This is the first of several pages on this subject.  Here I cover the software I use and some of the reasons why.  I don't go into detail about how to use each program, but simply mention why I use it.  On other pages to follow, I will show a few of techniques I've learned over the years. 

First things first: What is an artist?

I've communicated with a lot of people who want to do something creative and useful, something they consider good art, but who doubt their ability to be a real artist.  To create anything is human.  It is part of the "image of God" that He placed in our very genes.  Creative ability is not optional equipment, as many seem to think.  It is one of several qualities that are central to our God-given human nature.  Whether we are Christian believers, atheists, pagans, Buddhists or agnostics, we all have essential creative abilities that may be expressed in various ways. 

Everyone has the ability to develop a genuine skill in art. It's all about the depth of one's desire. While there are a few great "naturals," for the rest of us it is all about hand-to-eye coordination, and that means it can be developed, improved upon and even perfected.  Even if we are without the use of our hands, we can learn to express our creative ability effectively.

Joni Eareckson Tada is a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, totally unable to use her hands.  Yet she draws and paints, holding the brush with her teeth.  (See Joni's art and what she's doing now.)   If you think using a mouse is awkward, try using your teeth.  Take a minute to think about how difficult it must have been for Joni to learn how to create a recognizable image with a brush in her teeth.   Other artists challenged with the loss of their hands have learned to use their feet and toes.  The ability is not in our hands, our teeth, our toes, but in our hearts and minds.

The question, then, is not about how much raw talent a person has but one's determination -- and willingness to spend the time. It means spending time at a computer indoors (or at least with a laptop) instead of outside running around free and doing all the more interesting things the outdoors offer. Obviously, any aspiring artist can also go outside and have some fun once in a while. But mastering an artistic skill on the computer will take many hours, many days and nights, for years. And so you do not have as many skilled artists as there might be otherwise. I guess that's a good thing, since there are already thousands of artists online.

Software I Use

The tools I use are fairly easy to come by. I create most of my graphics in vector format, using CorelDraw. Sometimes, I use Adobe Illustrator. Very different programs that end up with similar results. Users of either one will usually tell you that the other is garbage. I, for example, prefer CorelDraw and often avoid using Illustrator because the process will end up taking me longer. But that has more to do with the time I've spent working with CorelDraw (since 1991). Both are excellent programs, and do almost all the very same things (even though they may call the things they do by different names). My commercial work occasionally requires me to use Illustrator for certain steps.

One interesting note: CorelDraw will open legacy (older) Illustrator files, but Illustrator will not open CorelDraw files. On the other hand, if you have both packages, you can simply drag an open CorelDraw image over into Illustrator with decent results (yet dragging an open image from Illustrator to CorelDraw produces a bitmap image instead of an editable vector image). CorelDraw will also save files to the Illustrator format, but Illustrator will not save to CorelDraw formats. These are little differences, but they can become important in certain circumstances. There are, of course, many other vector editing programs out there.  I cannot vouch for any of the other programs.

For all my regular (static) web graphics, after I create the vector image, I then go into Adobe Photoshop for final editing and finally export the image to a gif, png or jpg file, depending on how the file will be used. Photoshop has about the cleanest export to these web files, in my experience. CorelDraw does okay, but in the past I've caught it doing oddball things when exporting to png files.

For the animations, I build each layer or stage of the animation in CorelDraw or Illustrator, and then pull the file into Photoshop for bitmap editing, any special alterations, trimming, etc. For certain animations, I may build only a one layer image in CorelDraw and then generate (by duplicating) the other layers in Photoshop, adding any special effects. When all the layers are good, then I do the animation, adjust the timing to each frame, etc., and then export everything to a gif file. The process of building each individually may take a lot of time, depending on the effects I'm after, but it enables me to control the results pretty well.

I've also done a few Adobe Flash animations, sometimes going straight out of Illustrator, or using Adobe's Flash program to build the file. But I often prefer gif animations for simplicity, especially for files that I offer on the web for public download. So, I have used Flash to create a very smooth animation, and then converted the results to a gif. But I usually just do it the old way. I like having very predictable results when time is short, and it seems that my deadlines are often very short.

A cartoon artist I talked with recently says he is using a program called Xara, but I don't really know anything about it. If you're going to research the field, you may want to take a look at it, since I think it incorporates a number of capabilities in one package. You can get the sales pitch and (hopefully) some information via their website or from others using the software.

Jim Sutton
www.GospelGifs.com

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