Lucas Krech, a Modern Renaissance Man, Combines
Digital painting, photo manipulation, procedural art, rotoscoping and video effects in Studio Artist
Because Studio Artist’s extensive features bridge the gaps across many different traditional art software boundaries (digital painting, photo manipulation, procedural art, auto-rotoscoping and video effects) inside a single software package, it’s a perfect fit for an artist like Lucas.
Studio Artist user Lucas Krech is a bit of a modern renaissance man. Besides pursuing a very busy career as a professional lighting designer, Lucas also works with digital stills and photo fine art, and as a video artist. Lucas took to working with Studio Artist very quickly after getting a copy, and has used Studio Artist quite extensively across the wide range of all of his different diverse artistic interests.
I asked the New York based artist to talk about his work philosophy a little bit.
“My image making is rooted in the world of traditional photography as mediated by digital tools. I enjoy working with my own images and found content. I exploit traditional analog styles through the means of digital manipulation. When designing video content for live performance I root my work in the historical period of the show. This can mean finding public domain content for more recent settings or utilizing physical media styles like oils and watercolor for further back. I mix this found content with my own original images to construct the final design.”
In addition to digital still art and photo manipulation for fine art printing, Lucas uses Studio Artist to process video footage to create stylized dynamic moving art backdrops for use in live theatre productions.
“For the Coronation of Poppea we set the opera in 1962 and thus our visual style was based around the pop art movement just then bursting on to the international scene. I found material from Archive.org of that period and then used Studio Artist to rotoscope the content into a pop art look. For this project I was primarily using the MSG Image processor to build the look of each piece of video. The ability to rough in a look and then evolve it in software allows for both precision and happy accidents, a combination I love to find in my art making.”
