January Visual Trend: Digital Art Gets Delicate

In response to an ever increasing industrialised world, people are gravitating towards handicraft. For professional designers, this pull to handicraft isn’t about shunning technology, but rather embracing it. The once familiar boundary between fine art and digital art is blurring, and due to new tools — such as tablets and the Apple Pencil and Surface Pen — we expect to see a more astute eye for detail, more delicate brush strokes, and more fine textures. At this intersection of technology and creativity lies digital artistry, and it’s all about more realistic, delicate, and detailed art.

EUGENE ZANDO / ADOBE STOCK

The Transition from Analogue to Digital

Many artists are trained in traditional analogue media — sketching with pencil and paper, painting with paints on a canvas — and the move to digital media can be daunting. Others have always used a mix of analogue and digital media to create their masterpieces — painting from digital photographs or scanning sketches. And now a new generation that has never been without digital tools is coming into its own.

More and more artists are choosing digital media as the tools they use for their art because computing power and technology are constantly and quickly not only improving, but also innovating, what can be created and how. Artists like Filip Hodas know this well – he specialises in digital 3D art, building scenes that are both organic and surreal. Just as photography never replaced painting, but instead became its own medium, we are seeing digital art becoming its own medium with its own artists exploring all types of fine art compositions.

See how Filip created this digital artwork with Adobe Stock on Create Magazine.

Technology Enabled Reality

The digital medium allows for boundless creativity and it’s empowering creators. Digital forms and textures can be generated on transparent layers and then combined and reworked to create translucent color surfaces and finely textured designs. For example, think of Adobe Stock Contributor Natalia Hubbert’s work. She experiments with filtered and layered backgrounds in Photoshop to create a more rustic and aged look. Individual images can be modified easily to achieve more spacial depth for richly detailed, delicate creations on bright backgrounds.

NATALIA HUBBERT / ADOBE STOCK

With an emphasis on collaboration and fluid design, innovative digital tools are bolstering the creative process. Graphic pen tablets, for instance, offer a more intuitive approach to design with pressure sensitivity creating a level of precision and attention to detail we’ve not yet seen in digital art. From clean extractions to seamless blending, artists can create luminous color fields and finely textured, delicate design, achieving a one-of-a-kind quality that’s taking professional artistry to the next level.

LERA_EFREMOVA / ADOBE STOCK

Blurring of Boundaries

Artistic image editing in Photoshop allows designers to create paint-like quality. Delicate brush strokes on graduated colour surfaces result in graphic design that’s distinctive and unique. Fine textures and delicate colour schemes can be achieved using a mixture of analog and digital exposures for rich, expressive detail. This is certainly top of mind for Adobe, as our latest innovations, Stylit and Wetbrush, seek to simulate the texture and properties of sketching and painting by hand.

SUNNYS / ADOBE STOCK

Creating fine art with a computer may seem counterintuitive, but digital artistic editing — whether it’s delicate fractal curves or images drawn on a graphics tablet — is creating a new wave of digital artistry. Technology is the great disrupter, and it’s blurring the lines between digital and analog art. With new tools, new ways of collaborating, and new expectations paving the way, creators are free to create precise colors, textures, and details like never before.

VALI_111 / ADOBE STOCK

See our dedicated Stock gallery for more examples of delicate digital art., seek to simulate the texture and properties of sketching and painting by hand.