 growing demand for people who can illustrate that world. If you’re pondering a career and you like art, digital art is worth considering. Its also a field that robotics and automation can enhance, but not replicate. No robot can create original art, imagination is something uniquely human.
Imagination is also increasingly becoming an essential career skill in almost any field, not just art. Science would make little progress without imagination. Even in business management imagination is necessary to come up with solutions to various business problems. Art promotes and encourages the development of imagination so teaching art to students helps prepare them for almost any future career by helping to cultivate what is and will increasingly be a necessary ability.
Art in turn is impacted heavily by both science and mathematics. If you actually want to pursue a career in any field of art, and particularly in digital art, you’re going to need a good education in mathematics and a general education in the sciences. That might surprise some of you, why do you need to study chemistry to be good at digital art? Or why is algebra important and what will you use it for?
Why are Science and Mathematics essential to Art?
Its a fair question, and one that students need answered in order to help them find the motivation to be engaged in learning. There are four areas I want to cover specifically and give examples of why they are important to the digital artist. They are Biology, Chemistry, Physics and of course Mathematics. If you want to be a digital artist in the future (whether that be in the fields of game design or 3D animations or movie special effects or even just web site graphics) you’ll find all four of those sciences useful and mathematics in particular a necessity.
You might guess why biology is important to artist. Most art students today take at minimum a class called “anatomy for artists”. In the past these courses taught art students the basics of bone and muscle structure in humans and animals to help them understand how they affected surface topology. That is, why does an arm look the way it does, what muscles affect the shape of an arm and how does that shape change when those muscles are used. In the past surface topology was the main consideration an artist might have. But that is no longer the case. Now as digital artist work to create virtual realities that include increasingly realistic simulations of people, animals and even insects (as well as fantastic creatures and monsters), we need to know not just why the surface topology looks the way it does, we need to know how they move and why. That means understanding the bone structure in order to simulate joint placement and movement in 3D characters. We need to understand how muscles and tendons not just cause movement, but also the limits of that movement. So a good basic knowledge of biology has become increasingly important to digital artists because increasingly we are expected to produce very realistic results. You can’t do that if you don’t understand what it is you are trying to recreate.
This is another science that affects digital artists, and it might be a surprise that it does. While we no longer have to mix paints from mineral compounds as 19th century artists once did, we do still have to understand why things look the way they do. That means understanding color and what causes color; chemistry helps us understand this. Why, for example, is some clay grey and other clay is red? Chemistry answers that question. Knowing those answers helps us as digital artist to make better simulations of reality. We know why things are the color they are, and when they should be a different color. Chemistry also begins teaching us the basics of physics, and physics is something you will really need if you go into any kind of game design or virtual simulations.
Of the three sciences, Physics is perhaps the most important to digital artists.
Physics is about understanding reality and since much of digital art deals in some way with depicting or simulating reality an u