- Susan Ruddick Bloom’s latest work of art is also her largest and, perhaps, the most daunting of all her creations. It is her first book, “Digital Collage and Painting,” published by Focal Press, which took two years to write and weighs in at 608 pages. Inside those pages are more than 150 examples of the Art and Art History professor’s work as a high-tech fine artist. There are richly colored digital paintings, fanciful collages and breathtaking panoramic photos taken in exotic locales while she was on Jan Term, sabbatical and summer tours around the globe.
Susan Ruddick Bloom’s latest work of art is also her largest and, perhaps, the most daunting of all her creations. It is her first book, “Digital Collage and Painting,” published by Focal Press, which took two years to write and weighs in at 608 pages.
Inside those pages are more than 150 examples of the Art and Art History professor’s work as a high-tech fine artist. There are richly colored digital paintings, fanciful collages and breathtaking panoramic photos taken in exotic locales while she was on Jan Term, sabbatical and summer tours around the globe.
Designed as an instructional guide for professionals and serious hobbyists and marketed worldwide, the book’s chapters are full of useful information about making fine artwork on the computer with programs like Photoshop and Painter.
“There are lots of tools now available digitally that are much like traditional art tools, it’s just we’re not smelling the turpentine and getting our hands dirty,” explains Bloom, who earned both her B.F.A. and M.F.A. at Maryland Institute College of Art and who has been a courtroom illustrator, traditional painter and photographer. “Instead of pushing pigment I’m pushing pixels.”
Since buying her first Macintosh computer in 1984, Bloom has dabbled with digital imaging while also experimenting with combining mediums in the “wet” darkroom. Because she was never really satisfied with the photographic papers that were available, she would hand-apply various emulsions onto watercolor paper or charcoal paper, create the photographs and then go back and draw and paint into the images. “Only in the last four or five years has the quality risen so dramatically that I have jumped the digital divide—I hardly ever shoot film anymore,” says Bloom, who teaches a range of photography and graphic design courses on campus as well as at selective summer photography workshops in Maine and Palm Beach. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in photography.”
In addition to her own work, Bloom also solicited pieces from around the world by 21 digital artists, along with descriptions of their techniques.
“I asked them all sorts of nosy questions everyone wants to ask, like, ‘What kind of computer and software are you using?’, ‘What’s your printer like?’, ‘What’s your favorite paper?’, ‘Who inspires you?’ And then I had that artist walk viewers through their creative process,” she says. “It’s neat.”
See more of Sue Bloom’s digital fine art at www.suebloom.com. Digital Collage and Painting is available at local bookstores or at www.barnesandnoble.com.
Digital Fine Art blooms in prof’s new book