“the computer can do exactly the same thing, only more easily?”
Where do you get the impression it’s easier? I found it very hard to draw with a tablet at first. In fact, if you want a laugh, check out the first thing I drew when I got my tablet. Note the horrible writing. I mean, I was 13 and complete shit at drawing, but not completely retarded – I could draw and write a lot better than that on paper. Tablet feels far less intuitive, especially at first.
Then there’s the problem of texturing. Pencil, paints, and other traditional media, can produce interesting, nice textures just by virtue of the nature of the media. Digital artists have to produce textures much more manually….UNLESS they’re the sort of artist who “cheats.” I’ll get to that in a minute.
Similarly, line quality is hard to achieve in digital art. By that I mean, getting your lines to look like this as opposed to this. The first requires a very quick hand, which can be hard. Being too slow and deliberate will make your lines look shaky and pixelly and just generally bad. Not a problem I’ve ever had with a pencil. It’s kind of like drawing with a fountain pen all the time.
I just wanted to point these things out because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about digital art and how easy or hard it is. A lot of people seem to think the computer is doing a lot of work for you that it’s really not doing.
That said, of course there are advantages to digital drawing. You have an undo button. You can easily select the exact color you want to use without any mixing of paints. If the proportions are off on something you’ve drawn, you can enlarge, shrink, heighten or widen it. If your placement is off, say you put an eye a little too low, you can move or rotate it. You have layers. That means you can draw a sketch on one layer, draw your final work on a different layer right on top of it, and then just delete the sketch out from underneath when you’re done with it. These things can become a crutch. I’ll admit, I’m not always so good at getting things right the first time because I am used to being able to hit undo. But you can avoid developing such dependencies by denying yourself those tools. You don’t HAVE to use any tools you might consider “cheating.”
Some things I consider “cheating.” Using stock textures, or stock brushes, or stock anything, really. Lots of digital artists do partake, but I want my work to be 100% my own, and I think this habit serves me well, because it forces me to learn to render my own textures and whatnot. I’ve been trying to become even more strict about what I consider cheating – trying to draw on just one layer, trying to avoid using any kind of resizing or relocating tool – to try and improve some of the weaknesses I have developed. The less “cheating” you do, the fewer crutches you’ll develop. It’s all up to the artist’s discretion.
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