I recently had the opportunity of meeting with Rebecca in a local restaurant and talking with her for an hour or so about her personal life, her artistic life and her opinions about computers and artistic creation. It was a decidedly interesting talk.

Rebecca has always been interested in the creative side of life. It's an important part of her life, including drawing, painting, sculpture, woodworking and poetry. If one can inherit such inclinations, she came by the naturally — her father is also highly creative.

Rebecca had her own graphics company when she first started designing the covers for PC Alamode. She has had a lot of changes in her life this past year (she went through a divorce for one thing), but is now putting her life back together, and is considering having her own company again.

I asked Rebecca what the creative process was for producing the covers for the PC Alamode. She said that the fist step was the theme of the magazine for that month (supplied by editor, Clarke Bird), and the development of the concept around that theme. The second step is gathering imagery related to that theme. The third step is the creative process of putting together the graphics in an artistic and unique presentation, and in a graphically appealing way. The colors are very important, and need to be varied, unique, unrealistic (sometimes), and often unexpected.

Her preferred computer programs for doing these projects are Photoshop (“an incredible, exciting program”) or Illustrator to start the process, then QuarkXpress for laying them out. Other programs available for this include Photopaint and CorelDRAW. I asked her what the positives and negatives were in working with computers for artistic creativity. One positive is the release the artist has in being able to easily create what he or she can visualize in the mind. Another positive is that non-artists are able to create professional looking productions, with all the templates and tutors and wizards available, and with all the graphics available on the Internet.

The negative side is basically this: it is not tactile, not hands-on artistic creation. If you sculpt you touch clay, if you paint you smell and feel the medium, but with a computer, everything you create is virtual and exists only in your vision or on a disk.

When you receive you PC Alamode in the mail next month, look closely at the cover, because you now know more about the process of putting it there and more about the artist who originally created it. And smile while you're at it, for Rebecca Brown has found a new significant other named Jared, and she married him on Saturday, the 11^th of March.