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Digital Art Studio
Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause & Bonny Pierce Lhotka
A hands-on manual from three artists who were among the first to take the inkjet printer seriously as a fine-art tool. Written by the founders of Digital Atelier — Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause, and Bonny Pierce Lhotka — it is a guide to marrying digital printing with traditional materials: printing not just on paper but on canvas, handmade papers, wood, leather, and antique fabric, then working back into the surface by hand. Published in 2004, it captures a specific, pioneering moment, when affordable digital options for artists barely existed and these three were improvising the techniques. For anyone interested in mixed media, printmaking, or the early history of digital fine art, it is both a recipe book and a document.
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The authors
Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause, and Bonny Pierce Lhotka are the founders of Digital Atelier, a collaborative studio; they worked as artists, educators, and technology consultants, and their work is held in more than two hundred corporate and museum collections. They were insiders to the emerging field in the most literal sense — helping develop the very techniques, and sometimes the equipment workarounds, the book teaches.
The book
Published in 2004 by Watson-Guptill; it documents the genesis of digital mixed-media art from roughly 1994 to 2004, and covers preparing both commercial surfaces (canvas, watercolor and printmaking papers) and custom ones (handmade paper, wood, leather, fabric) to receive a print.
How it has aged
Partly as a still-useful technical guide and partly as a historical snapshot — the specific hardware and inks are long superseded, but the underlying idea, that a print can be a substrate for further handwork rather than an endpoint, has only grown. Read now, it is as much about a pioneering sensibility as about the exact 2004 workflow.
For more context
The Digital Atelier project, archived at the University of Iowa's Stanley Museum of Art; and the wider literature on printmaking as a hybrid, experimental medium.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause & Bonny Pierce Lhotka
- Publisher
- Watson-Guptill
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2004
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Maine