I am 51. PhD. Working internationally as an organization development and program evaluation consultant. Teaching at the university. Based in Moscow, Russia.

How did you begin with Digital Art?

I still consider myself a beginner. So, work is in progress. Since my early childhood I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent. Photography seemed to be the best way of realizing my dream as it did not require particular skills I never had. Photography was my hobby since mid-70s. It was always a nice way of expressing myself and my perception of the world and people. I read quite a few books, regularly visited photo exhibitions and practiced a lot.
In 2002 I purchased my first digital camera. It opened an entirely new world: unlimited number of shots, immediate review of the results and in most cases opportunity to make an additional attempt if needed, an easy way of filing the images and sharing them with other people.
Initially I used only the basic tools like the “red eye reduction”. About a year ago I was surfing Internet and ran across Gertrudis.

What’s your opinion About Gertrudis?

Outstanding! All of a sudden my dream turned into reality. I can convert photos into pictures and feel myself an artist Incredible. I think, Gertrudis opens new opportunities even for people like me who are not gifted and trained as artists but enjoy arts. Gertrudis helped me improve some of my photos and better express my feelings. One particular feature of Gertrudis I enjoy a lot is an opportunity to create ‘impressionist’ pictures. Impressionism is a style I always admired and enjoyed.
It’s obvious that Gertrudis can become a professional tool if the user is a professional artist. Some of the images in the ‘Users gallery’ demonstrate that.
Gertrudis Cons:

• User friendly.
  
• Numerous opportunities for creative work.
  
• Allows to improve even the photos that are not ideal and convert them into
  
• nice pictures.
  
• Saving results in pdf format.
  
  

What feature will you add to Gertrudis?

- A video tutorial. Could be a video demonstrating Gertrudis features and how a photo could be converted into a picture. Ideally video should be accompanied by professional comments. Some time ago I watched a TV show where an artist started from a blank sheet and created a picture. He was talking to the audience while drawing and commenting what he was doing. I found it wonderful.
- I would be very much interested in learning about how Gertrudis was invented.
- An on-line training course might be a good idea. At least some feedback and advice on the images posted on the website. Not sure if it’s realistic.

How do you think Gertrudis fit into the Digital Arts?

To answer this question I had to look into Wikipedia!. Here is what I found:
“Digital art most commonly refers to art created on a computer in digital form. Digital art can be purely computer-generated, such as fractals, or taken from another source, such as a scanned photograph, or an image drawn using vector graphics software using a mouse or graphics tablet. Though technically the term may be applied to art done using other media or processes and merely scanned in, it is usually reserved for art that has been non-trivially modified by a computing process (such as a computer program, microcontroller or any electronic system capable of interpreting an input to create an output); digitized text data and raw audio and video recordings are not usually considered digital art in themselves, but can be part of a larger project. In an expanded sense, “digital art” is a term applied to contemporary art that uses the methods of mass production or media.”
Considering the above mentioned definition I can say that Gertrudis nicely fits into Digital Arts. I am not an expert in this field indeed, but Gertrudis seems to belong to the classic digital arts tools that allow to non-trivially modify photos by a computing process.