cheating in CG

#21

ISnt Cg a copy of World’s art? Isnt world’s Art a copy of the real world? Isnt both their objectives to add something new to the world?

If dodge & burn tools are cheating, didnt Van Gogh cut his ear to put in his paiting? I never saw anyone saying

“oh u big son of a *****! U cheated! u cant use real blood in a paiting! it’s not fair!”

Every Artist is a cheater! And every piece of art is a piece of cheating! The bigger artist one is, the bigger cheater he will be.:rolleyes: well…maybe i’m exaggerating a lil bit on this last phrase…

#22

Errr, the winking smiley face at the end means I am being tongue in cheek . . . See the rest of my post for my opinion.

#23

After years of never ending dispute this discussion starts to get on my nerves. This is not a subjective matter, it’s perfectly objective and simple.
If you use any tool well enough, the result is all good.
[size=2]And the inverse:
[size=3]If you use any tool badly enough, the result will be bad.
[/size][/size]I just can’t understand why someone would argue with this, and try to place the blame on some particular tool. It’s so ridiculous as to defy description. It’s like saying my art isn’t good art if I used Prismacolor Green pencil - but only if I use Caran d’Ache Red crayon.

And yes, I’ve used Dodge, Burn, filters, photographs for reference, and whatever other nono you can think of, and I’m proud of it. I’ll do it again. I’d use Poser if I could see it helping me in any way. I’d cut off my ear if I thought it would help me create better art (well, have a surgeon remove it anyway).

#24

It’s probably not my place to chime in, but I’m gonna :wink:

I’ve seen lots of people mention that tools are there to be used, but a lot of these same people turn around and say filters are bad, or stock effects are cheap. I’d like to refine the thought a bit… if everything is a tool (and everything is fair game), then I propose that the art is in the use of the tool or technique.

For example, in another forum, we’ve posted many limited challenges. Things like only using filters, or worse, only using lens flare in Photoshop. The challenge starts out as an excercise in restriction, and blooms into fundamental creativity which is borne of that restriction. By taking away distractions like brushes and other basic tools, the artists are forced to learn control over something they usually waive off with derision.

The point of these challenges is twofold: understand the tool deeply; look around for new ‘tools’.

So, I can’t consider anything ‘cheating’ that is used with purpose and intent to create (as opposed to copying or otherwise deceive). I feel it’s all in the intent, and this applies to styles of art as well as technique and choice of tools.

As for the argument that using dodge/burn or filters is obvious, all I can say is ‘so what?’ If you look at a work and you can tell because of your own experience that someone dodged a bit to enhance a highlight, but it looks good, who cares? Other viewers or artists with different backgrounds may not know. Going further, if you look at a classical painting, you know a particular shade and stroke were used, but that’s not considered cheating. It’s control over the medium and the tools… mastery in art.

Steven beat me to the punch!*

#25

[size=2]

If you use any tool well enough, the result is all good.
And the inverse:
If you use any tool badly enough, the result will be bad.

[/size]Hey Stahlberg, I agree there is no point, however I am not sure of how you could generalize in the statement above. If the technique is great, does it mean necessarily the results will be great?

I understand that technique is quantifiable and measurable, but I can’t see “Cause & Effect” relationship between technique and results all the time. Especially in art, there is a lot of room for spontaneous, unpredictable results from erroneous technical adventures that could work very well to the advantage of the work. Inversely, sometimes well calculated techniques could lead to horrible results.

Today’s painting software is exremely limited in terms of allowing the artist to experiment beyond the menu commands. I would urge everyone who is solely trained on computers, to train seriously with traditional media to enrich the artistic skills, and be ready for next generation computing.

#26

I do not believe someone comes up with something like this. There is only one type of cheating in arts and that is copying other peoples work.

An artist tries to recreate the image in his imagination and it is his right as an artist to use any tool he can get his hands on and which he as an artist finds suitable to get his artwork onto his “canvas” whichever medium that might be.

Honestly it will even be art when someone builds a thought scanner that allows an artist to simply reproduce the image he is thinking of.

The art in art is that the artist gets as close in the visualization of his thoughts to what he actually dreams and therefor no tool is cheat, and if someone makes a astonishing picture with bryce and poser he is not more a cheater then someone who paints with oil on canvas.

#27

Well, IMO Copy&Pasting real pictures on to your art is kinda cheating.
But those ppl only hurt themselves in the long run. Their skills will suffer, and their peers will look down on them.

But CG already offers so much to the artist, that it could have been consider cheating in the first place, when compared to traditional media. Well, you cannot argue that you “undo” often and that’s is sorta cheating in itself. :stuck_out_tongue:

So maybe I’m too close-minded, and that there’s no such thing as cheating in digital.
Although I’ll still look at a guy’s picture in a bad light, if I find some cut and paste in his work.

#28

imho “cheating” is things like tracing, copy-&-pasting, grabbing colours from a reference photograph directly rather than finding them on the palette yourself, letting the computer decide to “auto colour”, “auto levels” and “auto contrast”, etc etc etc. Basically anything the computer does for you instead of you doing it yourself, imho, can in theory be considered cheating. And yes, in a way, the “undo” button is the greatest cheat of them all, which we have access to and traditional artists do not. :stuck_out_tongue: But I have to say, I kinda blinked in confusion when I saw that dodge & burn are considered cheating?

maybe because I’ve taken B-&-W photography classes as well as drawing/illustration/digital-stuff classes, but even in photography, it’s a perfectly valid and often necessary technique to use. It’s a lot harder to do well in the darkroom, though, as opposed to just grabbing the tool in Photoshop and using it as a brush at low opacity. :stuck_out_tongue:

to me, everything in Photoshop that can be used as a brush, very often does get used. even the eraser can be a painting/drawing tool, to create and not just take away.

filters, yep, cheating, cause you let the computer do it for you. undo button, wonderful perk/cheat that we CG people quietly hold onto with our lives. :stuck_out_tongue:

Dodge and burn cheating? i’m, um, kinda failing to see how…

#29

that’s not cheating. thats stealing! Now that’s a bad thing.

Cheating is good. Stealing is not.

#30

Careful here… what if the art is a photo manipulation or simple retouching? The core argument about cheating is where you draw the line. Is it in the technique, the intent, or the end product?

If someone cuts and pastes into their work, but the end result is startling, something you’ve not encountered before, why would you look down on them? If someone builds a sculpture from scrap metal (which is done time and again), that’s essentially cutting and pasting.

#31

If the technique is great, does it mean necessarily the results will be great?

Okay, let’s check my phrasing: “If you use any tool well enough the result is all good.”
Maybe it’s the “all” that confuses; it’s just a figure of speech, as in: “It’s all good, man.” I didn’t mean to say great. Just good, okay, positive, not negative, not bad. If someone uses any tool well enough, the result will be positive, not negative. Whereas, those who try to define certain tools as evil would have us believe that the result is negative no matter how well the tool is used.

imho “cheating” is things like tracing, copy-&-pasting, grabbing colours from a reference photograph directly rather than finding them on the palette yourself, letting the computer decide to “auto colour”, “auto levels” and “auto contrast”, etc etc etc. Basically anything the computer does for you instead of you doing it yourself, imho, can in theory be considered cheating. And yes, in a way, the “undo” button is the greatest cheat of them all,

Oh dear… I’ve used EVERY SINGLE ONE of those tools you mentioned. Most of them habitually. So has every single professional illustrator in the world who works with realistic humans in the computer, plus many others - for instance in traditional graphics, with the tracing and the xerox machines etc… and they’ve been doing stuff like that since the dawn of that profession. Fine artists have traced projected photographs since they were invented; before that they used the Camera Obscura.

It’s not what tools you use, it’s how you use them.

#32

Okay, let’s check my phrasing: “If you use any tool well enough the result is all good.”
Maybe it’s the “all” that confuses; it’s just a figure of speech, as in: “It’s all good, man.” I didn’t mean to say great. Just good, okay, positive, not negative, not bad. If someone uses any tool well enough, the result will be positive, not negative. Whereas, those who try to define certain tools as evil would have us believe that the result is negative no matter how well the tool is used.
I knew this is what you meant, but the bold size 3 quoted font was the reason of my response. I totally understand your point and I think it is true. By the way, it might work differently when you are an educator working with beginners. All cheap tricks are supposed to be abondoned so they learn the foundation technique and build an understanding of how things work.

Cheap tricks are only for Masters. Seriously, because in their hands they are not cheap anymore, just part of the big arsenal to use, but in the beginner’s hand it could be abused very easily.

#33

i agree with that. i understand what you mean now about the whole it’s all good thing. and i agree with that too. i suppose there is no cheating when working with cg because the tools are there for you, and are meant to be used. unless youre copy pasting blahblah, but taht goes without saying.
i heart undo.

#34

thats a cool idea. itd be interesting to see hte results.

#35

I read/heared an anecdote the other day (which seems somewhat “funny” by todays standards. I’m sure the whole crew was pretty perplexed at that time, to say the least).

Tron didn’t won the oscar for visual effects back in 1983 because the Academy thought it was cheating to use computers. Tron didn’t even got a nomination. I wasn’t aware that this was the reason behind it. Cheating? Oh well…

#36

Our tools are changing, the way we make art is developing all the time. We mostly don’t prepare our own canvas for to paint on with our home-made brushes and handmade paint made out of flagseed oil and stones like in old ages. Or is it cheating to buy that stuff in the store?? More artist discover the endless possibilities of computerart. It’s not cheating to use electricity to help us to make art, we welcome electricity these days, I don’t know anymore to live without it. Tools are just tools, not art. It’s the artist that creates the art. First he has to learn to work well with his tools, digital or not. Nothing magic here, but hard work, just like the old masters did: hard work!

Old masters “cheated” all the time, they twisted reality to paint easier, they developed tools to measure their subject exactly, they painted over ideas from other artist, even Rembrandt did this (I saw this a few weeks ago in a Rembrandtmuseum in Amsterdam). You can call that quote/stylequote, like writers often do in their art.

I don’t think dodging and burning are cheating, they are only tools, they can help to create a desired effect. Filters, masks, layers and so on are not cheating, but to make use of a new medium. It is hopefully not cheating to use glasses when I create art? without them I am lost.
Sorry for my poor English, I am from Holland.

#37

The issue should not be “cheating” but rather, “misrepresenting”

It truly gets on my nerves when a digital artist misrepresents how they made a piece of artwork.

Use all the tools you want, by all means, but please be honest when you show it to the world in explaining the process.

For example some one that says they used no photo reference or didn’t do a paint over and then moments later someone finds a very similar photo as their “painting” on Google images…

Or someone that says something was done entirely in 3D with no postwork when it was not the case.

Or when someone says something was done without PS filters eventhough it was.

And so on… you guys know what’ I’m talking about. Those people do a dis-service to all the honest, hardworking artists that show their work in places like CG Talk. It makes it harder for others to believe in the authenticity of truly exceptional works that deserve all our praise.

So just be true to yourself… be honest… be brave and unashamed. Be an artist AND BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU DO.

People can smell a phony a mile away so you might as well just do things the right way.

That is my advice…

#38

hehe… I know. I only said, they could be considered cheating. (I use them as well. :slight_smile: )
and what would we do without the Undo button.

(sorry, I guess i should have phrased my original reply to this thread better. thats what happens when i post at 9 am before having morning caffeine then dashing off to work :eek: )

#39

i’m pretty sure misrepresenting is cheating though.

#40

i’m pretty sure misrepresenting is cheating though.

hehe, I think we have a confusion of definitions.
Cheating can mean

  1. Using a tool in such a way that some artists see it as taking a shortcut
  2. Lying about taking that shortcut
    I think what we’ve mostly been discussing up to this point, is the first one. As I’ve mentioned, I see nothing wrong with the first one, it can be done badly and it can be done well. If it’s done badly, it hurts no one else more than the artist himself; more practise is the answer. But I agree, the second one is completely deplorable.