When I started my job at a state school in Austin, Tx in the late 90s, I discovered a bunch of probably 100-year-old hand-painted glass slides made for a projector called a Magic Lantern. I wanted to preserve/restore them, I scanned them in and we got an early version of Photoshop for me to touch them up. I had a small bit of electronic graphics experience, but I’d never touched PShop before, so I got to learn by doing. The project turned out reasonably well.
After I had finished that project, I started fooling around with the program, seeing what else it could do. I stumbled on a type of color-blending technique (used probably in a way that it wasn’t really meant to be) that I thought was cool looking, but also which gave results that were kind of hard to predict. That aspect of it was surprising and fun. So I started saving the pictures I was making. I’d never really done anything I’d call visual fine art before. Finding that one technique sent me into a decades-long rabbit hole of making weird art. I still use it to this day, though hopefully with a bit more sophistication, and a lot of other techniques along with it.
Flash forward to present day, I wanted to post an early piece on my art Facebook page (facebook.com/gdw3art), so I went looking through what I call my “early work”. Pieces I made in the period from 1996-ish to 2001, before I took a decade off from making any digital art to go back to school and move across the country twice (different story). I like this early stuff. Some of it is kind of naïve, but also sometimes pleasantly straightforward and even simple, in a good way. The colors are mostly very saturated, as that is something I didn’t learn well until much later. However, I did monochrome pieces very early on as well.
I got some positive feedback on that early piece. I starting looking at it and wondering if I would make it today. Probably not. So I decided that I should put some of these older bits out there, because why not? So please enjoy my new gdw3 Art sub-gallery: “Ye Olde Stuff“!
