It is hard for many younger people today to imagine a time without binary code. A time when things were mostly done by hand, and more to the point, without the aid of a computer. For many freelance illustrators in the design industry, making the change and adapting to the new technology, was a do or die proposition. Either you continued to work in the industry and embraced this new tool – the computer as a medium – or you went in search of new ways to make a living with your brushes and tubes of paint.
Most freelance illustrators had to adapt to the new technology to survive. Prior to desktop publishing, illustration work had been created using traditional organic mediums such as gouache pigments, pen and ink, and airbrushes. In fact, airbrushes themselves were invented and targeted specifically to the commercial illustrator. Speed of use, being the touted selling point, but also promised was the tool’s ability to help the illustrator to create realistic illustrations. Never before had a tool been so refined that it could control pigments in such a way that they could be applied with such a high level of precision. It became the illustrator’s tool of choice.
However, the learning curve of airbrushing is steep and long. Many illustrators considered the learning curve a long term investment, and to be accurate it did pay off for many of them working in the illustration field during the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even into the 80’s. But for those who invested the time to endure the curve in the 90’s, unaware of the technological binary boom that was on the horizon line of a new age, the days of using an airbrush were numbered.
Enter the Personal Computer and Adobe. When Adobe shipped “Illustrator 88″ in 1988, it caught the attention of freelance illustrators everywhere in the design industry. Up to that point, not many illustration jobs existed “in-house”. Larger marketing and design firms in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago could afford to keep illustrators working on staff of course, because the bulk of the design industry was centered in those cities. But by and large, most illustrators were home-based, preferring to ship their work to their client, and more significantly, this meant that they were free to have as many clients as they could accept, hence the phrase freelance illustrator. When savvy freelance illustrators learned what this new program called “Illustrator 88″ could do on a personal computer, it became clear that things were going to change.
No longer would the usual supplies of paint, brushes, illustration board, masking papers, tape, and all the other crucial necessities be needed. Also, the health risks of working with chemical-based fumes and particulates would no longer exist, since a computer and the software is all that is needed to create an illustration. In fact, rumor had it at the time, that once an illustration was “completed on the computer, it could be electronically sent to the client for free!” (email) This meant that a freelance illustrator, willing to learn how to use the computer and this “new program”, could compete for clients all over the world and in a much more efficient way, cheaper, easier and without ever leaving their home studio.
But all was not roses. The new software was not without it’s glitches and limitations. Many illustrators after trying it, labeled it “unintuitive”. This is due to the fact that “Illustrator 88″ was a drawing program, and not a painting program. Being a drawing program meant that it was vector-based, and used mathematical equations to form it’s shapes, based on “Bezier Curve” technology. This meant that the user would have to create his/her illustrations in “Mosaic” form, similar to Mosaic art, or assembling individual pieces of Stained Glass, like a puzzle to create an overall image. Not at all a natural way to work for most illustrators, being that in most other forms of creating art, the process “flows” like the paint itself, uninterrupted, inspired, and without the uptight concern of hard-edged “individual pieces”. Since many illustrators learned how to create art since they were very young in the more “intuitive”, “flowing” way, they deemed this new program as “unintuitive” and “Illustrator 88″ ultimately received little more than a luke-warm reception.
But Adobe had more up it’s sleeve. In 1990, the company released “Photoshop 1″ and it marked a new hope for computer generated graphics. In contrast to “Illustrator 88″, “Photoshop 1″ was a bitmap program, which meant that it was a painting, not drawing program. Initially targeted for photo editing, this new program could be used “intuitively” to paint illustrations, in much the same way that the traditional mediums were used. However there were two drawbacks. One, since the program was bitmap-based, and therefore the format was rooted in filling pixels with color, the size of an illustration had to be specifically determined before the illustration could be created. This meant that once the size was determined, it was absolute and could not be rescaled without unsightly and unusable pixel interpolation. And two, also inherent to bitmap files, is the fact that they require a lot more disk space for storage, which hampers both delivery and reproduction output. This meant that illustrations created with “Photoshop 1″ were by design, limited in flexibility, and once again this left freelance illustrators wondering if they will ever be able to use the new technology in an efficient way while still working from home.
The move to computer illustration was slow at a first, but by the mid-nineties, the software was fast becoming viable to work with on a professional level. Adobe Illustrator had caught on with graphic designers as the “industry standard” logo design software, and with illustrators as the optimum format for illustration work requiring total flexibility. Meanwhile, Photoshop had been adapted to many types of advertisement duties, mainly in optimizing images for ad placement at a specified size. But with each release, both programs have succeeded their respective predecessors, while more and more freelance illustrators adapted to the new tools.
Today, most freelance illustrators have become completely digitally-based, although a few are still working traditionally, with traditional organic mediums. Some have taken their airbrushes to the “Kustom Kulture” industry and are happily painting T-shirts, Motorcycles, and Cars. And fewer still, have even moved on to the world of Fine Art. But for the most part, the majority of freelance illustrators have adapted to technology, and are now working from home efficiently…digitally.
Larry LaBallister is a freelance illustrator specializing in vector exclusive photo-realistic images. His clients include BAE Systems Inc., Bianchi International, and Enaptive to name a few. He lives in Suburban South Eastern Michigan. Freelance Illustrator
http://www.freelanceillustrator.us/blog/