Which should you use for your project?
This question has been a decade-long struggle for me.
I grew up in a time where digital art was being pushed to the forefront of all media that I saw - movies, shows, books, and video games - and yet iPads and other drawing tablets were not as easily accessible as they are today. Procreate, the widely preferred drawing app for iPads, was nonexistent. The Apple Pencil was a distant dream. Photoshop still came in a cardboard box.
My preferred medium growing up was Office Depot printer paper. My parents had boatloads of it, and it didn't have the pesky lines that most notebooks had in them. Eventually, people caught on that my drawing habit wasn't going away - that I probably wouldn't be an accountant or an engineer - and started buying me sketchbooks.
I didn't lay my hands on a drawing tablet until the beginning of college. It boggled my mind, and I thought it would make everything so much easier. Every frustration I had with paper and pencil would be erased by this perfect device. I quickly found out that I would have to relearn a lot of things when drawing in Photoshop, and that in a few ways I had taken traditional media for granted. Let's look over what I've learned and see if this helps you make your decision.
Pros and Cons
Traditional Media - Pros | Traditional Media - Cons |
Reactive: every bit of weight and tilt you put on a pencil affects the line it produces. | Ephemeral: because it is a physical medium, art will only last as long is the materials that produced it, and those materials must be physically stored. |
Portable: easy to take with you anywhere, at any time - a sketchbook can fit in your pocket and be just as effective as its larger counterparts, unlike tiny drawing apps on phones. | Limited Canvas: the resolution of your drawing is limited by the page in your sketchbook. |
Energy + Charm: a more direct connection to the artist with no digital mediation means more humanity is visible in a pencil sketch than in a finished digital piece. | Messy: subject to smudges, hard-to-erase lines, or in some cases (like pens), permanent marks that cannot be removed at all! |
Digital Media - Pros | Digital Media - Cons |
Revisable: when doing professional work, making adjustments are much easier to make. 'Move that musk ox,' you say? No need to erase, just grab and move! | Technical: the hardware and software required costs a good chunk of change, and has a deceptive learning curve. Some artists don't enjoy or understand technology. Some clients don't either, and think digital art is a magic wand. |
Tidy: your sketches, coloring, and line art can all be separate and editable all on their own without effecting each other. Transparency on layers allows you to see underdrawings easily and keep on model. | Inauthentic: keeping everything organized, clean, and separate can make work look chopped up, disconnected, or overly polished, a fate far worse than messiness. |
Limitless: import reference images, select from millions of colors and adjust them via slider on a whim, photo effects and filters galore, hundreds of thousands of digital brush packs to explore and choose from - the world is your digital oyster. | Paralyzing: sometimes options make an artist go in the way of Baskin Robbins - analysis paralysis and buyer's remorse. With infinite options an artist may struggle more and more to justify artistic decisions and fall into comparison with other digital artists more easily. |
For myself personally, it boils down to artistic charm vs. professional polish. Others may be financially or technologically limited, or have artist communities that push for one over the other. These pros and cons are just my own experience, and I'd love to hear some of your experiences.
Why Not Both?
Over the last few years, I've been putting together a process that allows me to preserve my favorite pros of both mediums and smush them together into my own unique look. I love the energy and creativity that comes from pencil and paper, so I always thumbnail, sketch, and often do my linework physically. From there, because of my physical limitations (which is a subject for another blog!) and because of the ease of revision that digital art brings, I like to scan my pencil work into Photoshop, and edit and color from there. It's worked well for me so far, and I think it will only get better as I practice and improve on the process.
You may like other elements of physical media - maybe you like the messiness of it. Perhaps you gel with the bells and whistles that technology brings to digital art. How might you bring together the best of both of your worlds?
Thanks for stepping onto my stoop again this week. Stop by again next week to hear about the hills and valleys of freelance art work. Until then, safe travels.
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