In my lifetime, I've worked with all of the traditional forms of media, including watercolors, oils, pastels, and many others. My path to computer art began several years ago, when my daughter was training for a computer degree. One day she set me up with a second-hand computer, then showed me the basics of finding colors and brushes in a small graphics program. As my initial sketches became more complex, my son advised me to get a Wacom tablet and stylus for my computer, which luckily arrived with more advanced software.

I would soon realize that my tablet and stylus could indeed act as fine art brushes and tools. And my computer, with its blank screen in front of me, was fresh art paper. I knew then that I had a traditional studio setup for a fine artist. I learned a great deal from those first images. The process was slow and sometimes difficult, but each new discovery spurred me on. For my first experiments on the computer, I brought out my old watercolor sketchbooks, using them off to the side as references while I created new images. There finally came a day when I decided to really put my modern studio to the test. I cut flowers from my garden, sat them in a vase by my computer and proceeded to paint their images onto the screen. Success!

I dubbed those original creations computer-generated fine art, or CGFA. When I began, I couldn't find much to compare them to. These days, this area has become known as digital painting and it is rapidly becoming more popular. The term 'digital painting' can, however, be used to cover a range of definitions, from fine art created on the computer to fractal designs and retouched photographs. For my purposes, a digital painting is fine art that just happens to be created on my computer instead of my easel.

Over time, I eventually moved on from the older system to a new Mac computer. I use Painter software for my initial creation, then later refined minute details in Adobe Photoshop. Both Painter and Photoshop offer a wide array of features to use for image manipulations, though I'm getting what I need out of the most basic features. I've found numerous advantages to creating art on the computer, including the ability to take your image and reverse it, center in on any area, crop, resize and zoom in or out. Undo is also a nice feature, it's quite convenient to be able to go backwards a step immediately should you ever change your mind.

I also find it useful to save my artwork several times along the way, so I wind up with copies of the image from different stages in its creation. With these multiple saved histories, I have the option to at any time return to an earlier version as a means to correct or change elements as I see fit. This, in effect, allows me to go back to a 'clean' image with a fresh idea. The same original image can, in fact, be taken in any number of creative directions without limit. Sometimes I've even wound up with several different 'finished' images, though each can trace its origin back to the same original sketch.

Given the flexibility that the computer allows, it has given me new insight into the way I work out my compositions. In the beginning, I started by using traditional techniques on the computer. Now, using what I've learned on the computer, I can pass this knowledge back to my traditional artwork creations as well. They are a wonderful, useful complement to each other.

Of course, sometimes the computer just cannot replace my traditional tools. I do love to paint from life whenever possible, and I can't take my computer setup with me into a park somewhere. But I can sit at my computer and look out the windows, sketching the lighting and finding inspiration in the scenery. I can place flowers in a vase by my screen, and I can work from life with a dog curled up at my feet, offering itself as a willing subject. Perhaps the best example I can give of how I use the computer to work from life would be my Computer Corgi image. It depicts my corgi sitting beside the computer, while I work to capture his likeness from life onto the screen, using only my computer tablet and stylus.