Draw Your Imagination

How the New Age of touch screens has helped us to bring our ideas to life.

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

The term ‘digital art’ dates back to the 1960’s, a time in which we encountered Andy Warhol’s Commodore Amiga experiments and Stella McCartney’s trippy selfie videos. It is used to refer to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as an essential part of the creation, and it has transformed activities such as painting, drawing and sculpture as well as bringing to light the new forms of net art, digital installation art and virtual reality. Digital art techniques are used extensively worldwide, by the mainstream media in advertisements and by film-makers to create visual effects and, given the parallels between visual and musical arts, it seems increasingly likely that digital visual art will become accepted much in the same way as electronically produced music has over the past three decades.

APPLE DEVICES: IMPROVING ART PRODUCTION WORLDWIDE

Decades ago, creative roles had no choice than to be more defined and focused whereas nowadays an artist can work across many fields at once, even within one device. The rapid shift toward digital is no longer a problem for modern artists thanks to devices such as the MacBook, iPad and iPhone that allow you to work between multiple art production programmes at the same time. Back in 2015, 12 illustrators, photographers and filmmakers were handpicked for an Apple marketing campaign called ‘Start Something New’. This campaign turned Apple stores around the world into galleries that showcased art created exclusively on iPhones, iPads and iMacs. The artists, some of whom had already made a name for themselves by leveraging technology to create their art, were given full reign to do anything that they wanted for the exhibitions as long as they used Apple tools.