With the development of modern technology, digital art has been playing an increasingly important role in daily life since the 1990s and therefore, it also has triggered many discussions about its effects. Digital art, which is based on the traditional art, refers to forms of expression and transmission of the art form with digital form. (Weiming Du, et al. 2010) Nowadays digital art is stronger and more popular than traditional art. This paper will examine differences between digital art and traditional art in three aspects, ways of creation, novel display experience and propagation speed and efficiency, respectively.
Referring to ways of creation, digital art uses digital technologies as a tool to create art objects and their aesthetic effects. There are more and more artists who work on various kinds of art, drawing, painting and sculpture apply digital technology in their field of art. Additionally, the revision of digital art works can be easy. Traditional art, in contrast, it uses traditional painter' s paraphernalia such as papers or canvas, pencils, brushes and inks. And it is easily predictable that revisions can be a pain. Art material such as lead oxides may be used in some of the art, which may cause some environmental problems.
The Chinese Shadow Play illustrates this point. The Chinese Shadow Play is one of the glorious art works with a 2000-year history. The traditional shadow play applies the leather silhouette and the lighting which is manipulated by someone, to create the shadow on the screen. The actions of puppets can be dramatic with human voice and music while the audience can appreciate art show on the other side of the screen. Now there is a set of techniques developed for the simulation of Chinese Shadow Play. It makes an animation about the shadow play. A rendering technique based on the photo mapping method (Jensen, 2001) which applies in lighting aiming to capture the gleaming shadowing effect.
