Take a virtual tour through a digital art gallery

Find out more about Phil‘s digital creative process.

Digital Portraits

Phil Galloway is a master of portraits. But lately, instead of picking up his paintbrush, Phil has been reaching for his Surface & Lumia to create some stunning works of art.

Phil uses the Lumia 1520, Surface and the Fresh Paint App to create beautiful piece of digital art.

Phil believes that using digital paint is a fantastic release, giving a freedom and looseness to his art that otherwise wouldn’t be there. “When I draw in pencils and ink I work in a slow and methodical fashion, trying to impart as much detail onto the paper as I can, however when I paint on the phone I am not restricted by making mistakes, wasting paint or making a mess! This has led to a much more flowing impressionistic style coming through in my portraits.”

Try your hand at digital art with Phil’s Top 10 Painting Tips for your Lumia.

Kinect-ing Traditional Art to Modern Devices

Innovation in technology have deeply impacted the way we work, breaking the mold and changing the rules (or expanding them) across disciplines.

New digital tools have created alternatives for those who wish to expand their artistic expression beyond the simple brush and canvas. Combining traditional forms of art such as dance with motion-capture technology in Microsoft’s Kinect sensors and new editing software results in exceptionally unique pieces.

An outstanding example of this is a piece called ‘Unnamed soundsculpture’ by German artists Cedric Kiefer (onformative) and Daniel Franke (ChopChop).

Franke tells us: “For this work we tried to actually use the human body to visualise sound and record it while performing in three dimensions to create a moving digital sculpture that is connected to a certain sound.

In addition to that we wanted to capture the emotions that the performer puts into her movements to add this specific aspect to the digital visualisation of sound – something that you can’t program – raw, unpredictable, arbitrary, irrational – In a sense non-digital to combine it with a strong digital visual created out of raw data.”

Find out more by reading our Q&A with these two artistic innovators.

Movement Inspired Art Forms

Sergio Pappalettera is an Italian artist who also used Kinect to synthesize the human form and movement and turned them into beautiful works of digital art as part of the FuoriSalone2015 event in Milan.

“This is a wonderful project combining space and time. We’re taking the human body and using it as a canvas to produce artwork that’s individual and new,”

The cube-shaped dance platform featured modular screens that use Kinect technology to project the digitized human form of whoever was dancing in front of them. These performances were recorded in miniclips and digitally manipulated under Sergio Pappalettera’s direction using Surface Pro 3. The miniclips, transformed into works of art, were then reproduced on the Lumia smartphones exhibited at the venue. Lumia thus became the bridge between performance and public display of the art.

“With the help of this technology we can transform the body so that it’s not recognizable as we normally perceive it. We can design it to tell a new story of the human body.”

Check out this quick view of the results, and if you can’t get enough of Sergio Pappalettera, click here to find out what he has on his Lumia start screen.

Capturing the Digital Age with Skype

Elisa Perez is a Spanish artist who has created a uniquely productive way to multitask while Skyping – painting her friends and family as viewed over the miles through the Skype screen. She found inspiration for this idea while living abroad and Skyping with friends and family. Her series Screen Face is a window into this digital age.

“The idea for the project started while I was doing an Erasmus course in Brussels. Most contact with friends and family back in Spain was mainly via Skype,” says the artist. During these Skype-enabled conversations, she reflected on the many ways in which the Internet affected face-to-face interaction. From here, she launched her artistic endeavors—a process that included painting the portraits of those on “the other line,” and thereby representing a generation coming together through a computer screen.

Find out more about Elisa Perez.

Watch Elisa in action ⊲

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGyk3GxVFEA]