Digital Art: How Will It Look in the Future?

By Caroline Mustard | Co-Founder Mobile Art Academy |

“Picasso would have gone mad with this, so would Van Gogh. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t, actually.” David Hockney speaking about iPad art

When asked about painting on a digital device (phone or tablet), David Hockney, one of the greatest living artists, commented that the greatest artists of the past would have loved it. Hockney himself pioneered the creation of artwork using his iPhone and iPad.

Now iOS and Android tablets and smartphones have been an increasingly medium for fine artists around the world.  And one of the places to see the best of the best in this art arena is the  Grand Opening of the 5th Annual Mobile Digital Art & Creativity (mDAC) Exhibition on Friday 11th August at 5.30 pm - 8:00 pm (admission is free.)  It all happens at the prestigious Pacific Art League's historic building in downtown Palo Alto, right in the hub of Silicon Valley. 

Pacific Art League were the first to support us by housing our original mDAC exhibition in 2013, and we are happy to be back with them for our 5th year.

This year we have invited some experimental app developers and painters to join us at the Grand Opening to demonstrate digital art of the future using augmented reality (AR), 3D painting, and virtual reality (VR) technologies. Here you will get the chance to see how an artist studio might look in the next five to ten years.  

Microsoft, one of the exhibition's main sponsors, will be bringing along some new technologies which you can expect to see in art studios and school art rooms over the coming years.

One of the most well known of these is the HoloLens, the first self-contained, holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you.

Microsoft will also bring several paint stations and their Paint 3D app to the Opening Night so you can try your hand at painting in 3D. And, for those of you who'd like to make movies at home, try out their Story Remix technology.  

Also featured at the Grand Opening will be the best of the best artists from one of the leading painting apps, Procreate, also a sponsor o the exhibition. Their work is displayed on the Procreate Wall of Fame.

And you will be able to watch and participate in demonstrations by the two other leading art apps, SketchBook by Autodesk and ArtRage, also main sponsors of our iconic show.

All of this will be there for you to play with at the Grand Opening, along with an exhibition of 100 paintings and photographs created on a mobile device, juried from over 1,300 submissions from artists all over the world.

The show is brought to you by Mobile Art Academy who have pioneered the subject of educating artists in these new media, and who now have their own online Art Academy, MobileArt.HOW where you can learn how to use these apps through a series of online classes, along with painting techniques such as Plein Air, painting animals, and portraiture to name just a few.

Other sponsors for the show will be there to show their products and services: Bay Photo (who are printing the entire exhibition for the 5th year in a row), Paper 53 – one of the earliest and most popular apps around, iOrnament – an amazing app created by a leading mathematician from the Technical University in Munich, Germany.

TechCode, another of the main sponsors, will be hosting the two-day mDAC 2017 conference that follows the Grand Opening on August 12 and 13 in their Mountain View conference space.