Notes on the digital art works

Gift Cards
  The digital images were originally used for gift cards, Little Bird Visitor was, for example, the 2002 Christmas card that I sent people in both printed and electronic form. Using a computer seemed a natural extension of the printing, photocopy and collage processes that I had used for the hand made cards previously.

Methods
  Bamboo Boat was composed from two photos (above). The background is a beach close to where I lived shot with a digital camera that I had borrowed and when it came to making the card the camera was no longer available so I captured the little boat by placing it on a flatbed scanner. The two images were then combined in Photoshop. A similar method was used for Cottage and Anchorage, the scanned toy house and trawler placed this time in landscapes rendered with an early landscape generator called Vistapro. Little Bird Visitor on the other hand is a raytraced 3D model of a house with the cartoony bird drawn and inserted later into the image with Photoshop.

  Although Photoshop allows considerable scope for refining composited images I felt that retaining the qualities of the original bitmaps and resisting the impulse to add a high degree of finesse as important qualities for avoiding the slickness that pervades professional quality digital art. Hence the crude anti-aliasing and vivid greens characteristic of a Vistapro render are left untouched and the scanned objects lit with a cold hard light sit in the pictures in a fairly ambiguous way.

Sources for the ideas
  It was during the period that I made these pictures I started to think about houses - what they meant not only in terms of living, building and renovation but also socially and metaphorically. The neighbourhood where I lived had a high degree of interest in property values but a poor sense of what defined an interesting area socially or aesthetically. In response the building in Cottage was chosen because it resembled in character the house that I lived in and the rendered 3D landscape is an exaggeration of the surrounding topography. The circumstance of moving house prompted Little Bird Visitor and something of the pathos of the little bird suggests the effects of transition.