All the images you will see here have been created digitally. Often when I tell someone that I work with digital art, they immediately think of 3-D rendering, Photographic Manipulation or other such types of work. Few people are aware that art has begun to enter the digital world in more "traditional" ways. Just as music, film, and photography have done in the past decade, the art world is now making a similar digital transition. This new medium is called Digital Painting.

To create the works you see here I use a Wacom Digitizing Tablet and a program by Corel called Painter X. The methods are the same as with paint. I start with a blank "canvas" and use strokes of the "brush" to produce the images. I process the final images in PhotoShop where I make adjustments to color and do post production work to prepare the piece for print. I first began working with this combination of tools in about 1995. At that time the Painter program was very new. My first version was Painter 4.

Corel Painter reproduces traditional painting and drawing mediums in a digital environment. The result is a digital system that faithfully reproduces everything from pencils to oils in an overwhelmingly realistic manner. I'm not sure exactly how they do it. I call it magic. I have every possible type of medium, brush, and painting surface available at all times. The paint is never too dry or too wet to work and there is no setup or cleaning time involved. When I sit down to work on a painting I can spend all that time painting and not dealing with solvents and brushes and trips to the supply store. The creative freedom this allows is beyond description.

When printed on fine art paper using professional printing services, I am hard pressed to tell the difference between a print of a digital water color and a print reproduced from a traditional watercolor medium. The same can be said of each medium that the program reproduces.

I saw the potential impact that this could have on the art world and was excited to be a part of such a new medium. In 1997 my work was featured on MSN as "Digital Artist of the Month". At that time my works were the only ones featuring this new medium. The other featured artists were all presenting CGI and Photo Manipulation pieces. I knew that such works must go to print in order to be marketed. A digital file offers no real value as a work of art. It can be copied and reproduced infinitely. This is not a good thing if trying to hold value in the art market. Imagine if the "Mona Lisa" could be copied and e-mailed thousands of times with each copy being identical to the first - That would not do! Even a work as great as that would soon be rendered worthless.

The obvious answer was to release the works as Limited Edition Prints. The original would be my digital file, never to be released. In this process the work is not truly complete until it is printed. There would be no "original" in the traditional way. Normally there is an original on paper or canvas and then the prints are reproduced from that. The quality of the prints never quite match that of the original and due to the nature of traditional printing techniques, print #200/200 would not match the quality of print #1/200. The value would suffer from the trickle down of imperfections inherent in the process. In a digital world there would not be a physical original. The digital printing process would assure that each print in a set of 200 would be identical. In effect the digital process produces 200 "originals". Each one a true representation of the artist's intended presentation.

I set about the task of finding a printer and that was when I hit a snag. There were simply no printers working in the digital field at that time. There were plenty that could take an original work from paper or canvas and print it in the traditional means, but none who could work the way I envisioned. In addition to that, to produce works that would translate into fine art prints the file sizes required to work in far exceeded what was available on a desktop PC at that time. I knew it was only a matter of time before all the elements caught up. I waited.

I am now pleased to say that the waiting is over. At nearly the same time as I was dreaming of this method's potential, someone in France was working on the problem. In 1996 a new printing process was invented in Paris. The process is called Giclee (Zee-Clay). This process is very similar to that of an inkjet printer in that it sprays the ink onto the paper. It is a digital process and it produces outstanding color and detail. Currently this process is becoming more widely available and preferred to traditional methods. It has fast become the standard in fine art printing. I am very fortunate to have a print house near me that now carries this process. Processing power is now able to handle the file sizes with ease and with the opening of this gallery I am pleased to finally be offering my work as Limited Edition Prints.

My work will be presented on Somerset papers. These papers are %100 cotton, acid free and crafted at St. Cuthbert's Mill in England, a world renowned supplier of archival papers specifically designed for fine art prints. The exact type of paper is chosen depending on the piece and what suits it best. Paper will be either 330 gram or 500 gram and may be flat or textured. Some works will be printed on canvas as well. These paper choices are not options. The choices are made to best present the piece in question as selected by myself at the time of printing. All works will be of the finest possible production value and will retain the look and value of the print for years to come.

I hope that you enjoy your stay here and that you will be interested in purchasing my works as I endeavor to be a vital part of this new era in art.

Thanks for visiting,

Stephen J. Laurent