Saturday, November 19, 2011

What's the difference between abstract art and vector art?

I am looking up a few designs and was wondering what the actual difference was, since I've seen very similar pictures listed as both abstract and vector (depending on what site I'm on). Thank you.|||I'm a digital artist.





The words "vector" and "abstract", as applied to images have nothing at all in common.





Abstract is a STYLE of artwork in which an artist might work - just like an artist might do cubism or pointilism.





Vector is a technical method of putting an image into a DIGITAL IMAGE FILE FORMAT. Many artists know nothing about this technical digital image file format stuff. They make pictures, the underlying digital image format particulars may not concern them. Their image editing program or camera takes care of these details.





So, an artist could make a vector-based image which is abstract or one which is figurative, or any other style. Same for a raster-based image.





An "abstract" image is abstract art, as opposed to "representational" or "figurative" art.





A vector image is a digital image made by using a list of X and Y point co-ordinates, angles, lengths and colors to represent an image. That is, opposed to a "bit-mapped" image, which uses a "raster".





The Vector image method tells the computer "Start at this point and then draw pixels of such-and-such a color at this angle for this length and then go to the next item in this list." A raster image tells the computer to start at the upper left and start filling the image boundaries with colored pixels, line-by-line from left to right until the image boundary is filled.





Vector images have areas of solid color, like a map or a cartoon drawing. Bit-mapped images have continuous tones, like a photo. A typical bit-mapped image file format is JPEG or "somepicture.jpg", while a typical vector image file format would be "somepicture.gif".





See the Wikipedia references for more.





Hope this answers your question...


_jim coe|||'Abstract' covers the whole field of non-representational art. I presume that 'Vector' is a type of abstract art, like, say, 'Op Art' and 'Vorticism' are types of abstract art.

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