Traditional vs Digital (Am I ready to go digital?)

Garasin

Hi all,

I recently gotten back into drawing more and I’m still chipping away and working on my fundamentals. I recently acquired my friends Cintiq 13HDand I’ve been thinking about doing more work digitally.

My concern is if I switch to digital it would hinder my learning and I my start to develop an over reliance on things such as ctrl+z, warp, transform, etc and I wouldn’t develop my fundamental drawing ability as I would traditionally.

I’ve provided some examples of traditional my work below (copied from photo reference but some are straight copies of other art). What do you guys think, am I overthinking it and going digital would be fine, or should I stick to a more traditional approach until I’ve got my fundamentals are more developed?

Also, apologies for the poor photo quality, I don’t own a scanner yet and had to use my phone!

Thanks for your time!

lotet

tools that makes things easier should never be discouraged or seen as a danger, in my opinion. lets look at it the other way around, do you think you would learn more by intentionally making things harder for you? like for example not draw with your dominant hand?

there isnt really any difference between an eraser and ctrl+z. one is just a bit better then the other =P and saying you cant correct mistakes when you notice them sounds very counter productive in my opinion.

restrictions can be good when focusing on specific subjects and remove bad habits.
lets say you need to study shading and form, removing colors from that equation, working only in black and white can help you a lot. but unless you have a specific issue you know about, and need to work on, setting arbitrary restrictions on yourself is only hurting your progress.

JordanN

Garasin said:

Hi all,

I recently gotten back into drawing more and I’m still chipping away and working on my fundamentals. I recently acquired my friends Cintiq 13HDand I’ve been thinking about doing more work digitally.

My concern is if I switch to digital it would hinder my learning and I my start to develop an over reliance on things such as ctrl+z, warp, transform, etc and I wouldn’t develop my fundamental drawing ability as I would traditionally.

There's no such thing. I remember having this fear put in me back in College. I understood the sentiment of don't use it as crutch for failing (i.e bad perspective will look bad in both digital and traditional. There's no covering that up), but the idea you can "ctrl+z too much" don't exist.

When I switched from traditional to digital, I was able to spot mistakes more easily. The fact I can clone my drawings as many times as I want and compare the proportions in the same canvas is many times more faster and efficient than redrawing them on a piece of paper and having to use an eraser, use a ruler etc.

pior

- Stick to traditional only for at least one full year
- Start doing studies from real life objects
- Join a weekly life drawing class with a good instructor
- Think about your legacy. Do you want the mark you leave on the world to be fan art ? Original work ? Portraits of people you like ? (all these are valid of course !)
- Find/use the tool that you are the most comfortable with, as it doesn't have to be pencil - you might be a sharpie guy, a Copiic guy, and so on. If it feels wrong, don't bruteforce it.

If you do all that I can pretty much guarantee that you will become better (and getting there faster) than if you started messing around with digital now.

RN

Garasin said:

My concern is if I switch to digital

You're not going to switch to digital, you're going to add it to your set of tools. You'll use both traditional and digital media forever.
It's so fun sketching the layout of your digital piece on paper, away from the computer.

I think one of the reasons why Pior recommends that you should stick with traditional for a while is that it's a simpler way to train your perception -- how to take that thing you're seeing either with your eyes or from imagination, and make a drawing out of it.
There's no software or graphics tablet, it's just paper, pencil & eraser.

Greg Westphal

Everyone else has kind of already said it but the big thing as an artist is your understanding of the world.  If you understand light, than any medium that utilizes light will showcase that understanding.  Same with the ideas of form and perspective and so on.  The reason why most people tell you to stick to traditional is because you don't have any crutches to fall back on.  

For learning it is sometimes helpful to showcase your understanding in a medium that requires just as much effort to cheat, as it does to just do the work which is why people say pen and paper.  When you start learning digital you can trace faster/easier and use 3d or images that have form already to crutch your understanding.  It'll show though to people who actually have the fundamentals mastered. Pior made a good point in thinking about what you want your legacy to be and that mostly comes in what you're willing to practice in terms of artistic understanding, not in terms of medium choice.

Garasin

Thanks for all the responses people, it's really appreciated.
I think I will do some digital work but I'll stick to traditional studies and practice as well. 

Cheers!