D&D General When Did Digital Art Become A Thing?

[Stormonu]

I remember having a Wacom drawing tablet for the longest time, I want to say pre-2000. So I know drawing directly on the computer has been around for quite some time. During 3E, I’d scan my drawings and color/clean-up for use in PDFs.

The type of digital art that looks off to me is those that use 3D assets, like Daz Studio. The first D&D art piece I remember utilizing something akin to what I consider “digital” was in 4E, the picture of githyanki. I may be wrong, but to me the figures look hyper-realistically unnatural in the way that 3D poser images look.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah but the non-digital you see in the finished movie is the scanned background. And it that isn't enough to make it digital then neither is this (which also used scanned painted background and digitally drawn characters.)

View attachment 353637

Love Monkey Island!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm dead certain digital art would have been the majority of D&D art by the time 3.5e was fully underway, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if most of the art of 3e was digital as well.

As others have noted, drawing tablets aren't new, they're really quite old tech actually, and pervasive access to them has been available since the early 2000s at least, if not earlier.

 

[pawsplay]

If I had to pull a date out of my hat, I'd say by 2002 there were not many fantasy artists who were working entirely trad. By the late 1990s, Wacoms, and notably, used ones, were widely available to non-professional artists.

 

[MoonSong]

I know digital art is old. And even domestic digital art (the Koala pad started selling in 1983) , but I think the first domestic computers able to do quality digital art would be the Amigas(1985). I'm sure 3e art must have been at lesst traditionally handdrawn, and MTG art must have been all digital no earlier than 2005-6

 

[Reynard]

My wife went to SCAD in the mid 90s and there was a Digital Art major then.

 

[ezo]

@Zardnaar

"It was in the early 1980s, however, that an artist Harald Cohen with a group of engineerings invented a paint program named AARON: a robotic machine designed to make large drawings on the sheet of paper placed on the floor. Initially, the machine was creating abstract drawings, then those turned more representational over time and the machine was able to imitate shapes from nature. In the ’90s, AARON also started to implement color to the drawings. Even though Cohen was always very careful not to claim AARON’s creativity but rather his own, considering the machine just as a tool for his own expression, his program is now considered as a harbinger of what we know today as Artificial Intelligence."

Digital Art - Definition, History & Innovative Art Forms

What is Digital Art? Read about the history of Digital Art, the most innovative artists in the field, and how technology is creating new artistic possibilities!

magazine.artland.com

 

[Zardnaar]

So mostly 90s becoming standard early 2000's?

 

[Joshua Randall]

“Standard” meaning what?

 

[Zardnaar]

“Standard” meaning what?

Basically the default at least in D&D.