Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - Art: Traditional vs Digital

Didn't know where to put this BUT this part of the forum seems reasonable

I'm a part of this group on Facebook called Sketchbook art and started a discussion about traditional art vs digital. Majority of the group members are older and have been in the industry for a lot longer than I've been so I was very interested to see -their- take on the subject. As the week went on, it (the discussion) got a lot of good replies so I wanted to try it out here, amongst all you fellow comic artists and what not.

Here's my initial post from the group:

I think this has been talked about in the forums here and there. Most people respect both forms, though they also have personal favorites.
I use photoshop for comic making because it is time-efficient. But it's like any other media. You want a clean, commercial feeling for your art, go digital. You're looking for a heavy, texturized feel, go acrylic or oil. You want light, transparent and clear feel, go watercolor. The artist has to choose the media according to what he/she wants in the art. It's not like any one thing is superior to another. They're different, and are used differently for different purposes.

Traditional and Digital go hand in hand.

I know a majority of artists who rely on tablets using a stylus in order to get things done. I also know they practice with pen and paper as well, at least the good ones. They've learned how to draw by old methods that have proven themselves to be concrete in time, no matter what medium you choose to hold.

This line is further blurred with the accessability of technology. You can scan things with, well, a scanner, and upload what you have physically drawn with your own hands onto a medium to be shown and distributed. There's also taking pictures of portaits and sculptures and so own and showing them here on a digital platform. If you want, you can even spruce it up with some digital components, if it even needs it at all.

I feel that this argument:



Is rather faulty. For one thing, which jobs? Even the most digital forms of media and animation still require hand-drawn storyboards to be properly expressed. Even then, don't get me started on architecture, and then character conceptualization, which is vastly hand-drawn.

To sum it up, digital forms of art rely mostly on traditional forms of drawing. Traditional forms of art require digital forms of propagation in order for it to be more known and to gain more publicity and on-lookers in the internet in a day and age where the world wide web has a powerful hold over global politics and overall social interaction.

Hand in hand!

I like the organic qualities of the line weights in traditional art. I try to simulate brush lines with markers, so that's a bit like using Photoshop in the real world. And I end up doing quite a lot of edits to my "traditional" art in Photoshop -- head's too wide? Scale that sucker. It's a lot of scaling.

I kind of envy anyone who can do great work digitally. I didn't grow up with a computer and can't seem to get the hang of it. I just feel far away from my "canvas".

Mistakes are SO much easier to fix/avoid digitally. I spend so many hours whiting mistakes out...


I will say, I kinda hate digital lettering. I'm glad it exists because if I had to hand-letter my comic too, my hand would eventually fall off. But it's all so stiff and lifeless -- I miss the hand letters of, say, John Costanza. And mine, from before I had a computer.

I hate translucent word balloons. They're distracting.

Each has their own benefits, and for sure, each requires a large amount of practice and learning. Someone who works in watercolors knows how to get the look they want using the particular strengths and weaknesses of that medium; someone who uses photoshop is the exact same way.

I guess for my comic, I sort of use both, as the actual drawings are done traditionally but are then worked so heavily digitally that it gives it a half-and-half look. Or at least that's what I aim for. xD

Me, I have a lot of respect for people who work with traditional mediums solely because there's no "undo" function.

I have no idea what I'd do without ctrl+z.

I was hired to do my current job because I was known as a good digital artist, to work under a traditional painter who started dabbling in photography. She started off thinking that all digital artists have it easy, that it's a shortcut and you can undo your problems away. After a few weeks of working with her, she has told me that digital artwork is the hardest medium she has ever used, and she now has a huge respect for digital artists.

I think as far as learning is concerned, digital has a huge, huge learning curve compared to traditional. As the guy from CTRL+Paint describes it, learning to draw digitally is like trying to juggle while balancing yourself on a unicycle, and you don't know how to do either one yet. As a result, a lot of traditional artists feel left out because they don't know how to use the program, and understandably so. I was fortunate enough to start using Photoshop at an early age, so using Photoshop is kind of second nature to me. But ultimately, all artists, traditional or digital, have to learn the same set of skills: composition, anatomy, line weight, etc. And most people learn that stuff traditionally first, digital or not.

Anyway, the reason why I work completely digitally is because I want a certain look to it without having to spend thousands of dollars on celluloids and cel paint (if they even sell that anymore!). It's supposed to look like an animated film, and most animated films these days are painted on the computer. If I wanted to make my comic look grungy, I'd reach over for the inkwell and my G-Nib. Aesthetics dictate the medium, IMO.

Wow, how have I not been reading this? That look is fantastic. And it reads good too. Sub'd.

The tool does nothing until a human hand uses it. Better tools can, of course, influence results. For example, software makes effects available that many could never achieve by hand. The art will look better to the untrained eye because some programmed effects substitute for talent. Think of a pen and ink drawing rendered using the stippling effect. It's an effect that can mask the level of the artists ability.

Say I were to produce my own comic digitally. Would it look better? Absolutely! It wouldn't look better because I had suddenly improved as an artist. It would look better because I had purchased the tools. The perceived increase in ability would be purely a function of my having the money to acquire the tools. I would, in effect, have "bought" talent. As an aside, no, it wouldn't be cheaper for me to do my strip digitally. In 2 years I've spent less than 50% of the cost of a bamboo tablet. At that rate a bamboo would take 5 years to pay for itself.

At a certain level things even out. I can have all the digital tools in the world and people like Reginald Parr and OFools can still outdraw me armed with a Snickers bar. It's still the hand behind the brush, or keyboard.

It moved. I think it moved. - George Costanza

I mainly prefer digital because it's more forgiving, and I'm very unorganised. Managing all the materials and supplies needed to work traditionally would be a real hassle. Although I'd love to be able to more traditional work, I just don't have enough space/time.

I agree with Unka John: the whole argument is a false one really. It's like when they invented oil paint, those tempera and fresco painters probably said exactly the same things. "Oil paint? - ha I sayeth! thou can'st just wipeth out thy mistakes? That be'est not an artist! are'st thou kidding me?" An artist can use any and every medium he or she chooses - all that's relevant is the end result.


Amen to that brother.

I've actually had to do some soul-searching when it came to this subject. As one of the older artists here, I learned all my art skills traditionally, I didn't do one single digital effect on ANY of my art until I was in my mid-thirties. My traditional style is with pen and pencil primarily, but I also have used charcoal, monoliths, conte crayons and such. But my coloring skills have always been a tad lacking.

For that I used Prismacolor art markers. But that was proving to be rather expensive since those little devils were costing four dollars for just one. It was quite easy to go through a twenty when replenishing my stock and my budget has always been tight.

At my place of work, I have an 11x17 scanner and a former co-worker suggested I try digital coloring. I started that in 2007 and spent the next five years coloring my work digitally in Photoshop. I did learn some skills with effects and texturing among others. So I would draw traditionally, but color digitally. My sojourn into the digital realm was more motivated by economics than anything.

When I joined Comic Fury earlier this year and began to do comic pages again, I wanted to do them in B&W/Grayscale. I applied my digital skills and got some unusual art as far as my art style is concerned. It looked great, but there was something about it that didn't sit right with me. I decided to ask an old friend to give his opinion on my new work.

The response was quite blunt, he said the digital effects were smothering my line art and costing me part of my artistic identity. I was initially surprised, but the more I looked, the more I realized what he was saying. In my traditional work, I do a lot of hatching and feathering for tone along with traditional mediums of gray. I had abandoned that for the sake of digital effects since the fine lines tended to leave white spots amongst the digital effects that were time-consuming to fix.

I came to the conclusion that a prominent digital presence was simply not meshing properly with my art style. I didn't want to sacrifice personality for the sake of going digital, so I decided to return to my original style in B&W and save the more prominent digital effects for color work.

It doesn't mean I plan to abandon the digital medium, it has many uses and effects that would be either extremely time-consuming or just plain impossible to reproduce with my traditional means. But I now am trying to find a balance between traditional and digital where they mesh as a whole instead of one seeming to overlap the other.

And one last thing, for me, I need to have an original in my hand, something I can see and feel. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

Haha..never actually thought about it that way on oil paint...But yeah, that kinda makes sense o_o

I don't see it as a one-or-the-other situation, really.

For my own comic, I tend to spend equal time between traditional media and digital, drawing and inking everything on paper before scanning and coloring/lettering the strips on the computer. Admittedly I feel like it takes me a LOT longer to finish a comic from start to finish than it should, so I'd LOOOOOOVE to go completely digital, but that's simply not an option for me right now. The nicest tablet I can afford is a cheap Wacom Bamboo and, to be honest, I simply can't draw on one space while watching it appear on another.

My sense of perspective gets destroyed if I can't physically see the lines appear under the top of my drawing tool. Not sure why, it just does (and drives me crazy). So, until I can somehow afford a Cintiq on which to draw (I've used one before and it was fantastic, saved SO much time being able to properly draw my characters directly into Photoshop and Flash) my comic is going to have to remain a hybrid creation.

Really, it seems odd to me not using at least SOME digital resource in my work. I've developed creatively with the Adobe/Macromedia suite as a natural part of my tool-set (having trained/worked in design for awhile), so excluding them would just be wrong.

Anyone who doesn't consider digital art as being equally important to the traditional sort needs a firm slap, frankly.

Hilarious, but so true.

For myself digital is the way to go simply because it takes me less time to produce a full page (most of the time, I'm still learning myself). It's fairly easy to do edits to my work. It's easier to keep all my assets organized and it's cleaner (what I mean by this is I don't have to worry about spilling paint or something on the floor because I'm clumsy).

With all that said it's really up to the artist what they want to use. The medium will help clarify the message that is being delivered. I myself like to see a variety in the art styles of the comics I read.

I don't think it's just you man. I'm the exact same way. I tried drawing with a Wacom Bamboo tablet and the results were a disaster.

I know practice makes perfect but with the limited amount of time I have to produce my comic in the first place I had to cut my losses.

I'm saving for one of the new Cintiqs. Those things are just waaaaay too sexy. (wiping drool from my mouth).

I do a little of both. Most of my art was done mainly by hand, but a huge portion of it was doctored on the computer using a tablet or mouse. Plus, photoshop, paint.net, paint, and image composer are all major enhancers as far as general overall quality is concerned. Like making blacker lines more firm, making shades even, moving framing lines that arent straight.

Anyone who only uses one, and swears off the other, is missing a huge oppurtunity to get the best of both worlds. Tablet or mouse, hand-made art can only get better when combined with digital.

How awkward, people are saying they do digital because it's quicker. :L Not... really. I think it's quicker because you know it, because you're comfortable and you know what to do. I'm much faster with traditional because that's what I was brought up on, a traditional watercolour page fully inked and coloured is only about 4-5 hours work, sometimes less. And if I tried to do the same thing on Gimp, well, it'd take me almost double the time, because I'm just not as familiar with it and not as confident. But the more I use digital progammes, the faster and (hopefully) better I get.

It's the same if you're used to nothing but digital and then going to try traditional. It's going to take you longer, because you're not used to it.

It's the skill of the artist, not the medium or programme that makes the artwork. It doesn't matter what you use, and it shouldn't matter.


unless you're like, painting with poo or something... then it matters.

A lot of digital art has a sameness about it, I suppose because people are using the same programs and algorithms and whatnot, leaving automated smoothing on and so forth. Perhaps that will become less and less the case as more digital tools keep being invented.

I find that the stuff I like most tends to be traditional, although this is certainly not always the case; but I like art where you can sort of see the rough edges and how it was made, and that's harder to find in digital art because people tend to hide their tracks with fancy tools...hm and I suppose it's easier to obliterate stuff digitally, anyway.

But it doesn't really matter because obviously traditional wins since it has more letters.

Traditional is definitely much quicker for me. I can't even begin a decent looking digital picture without at least sketching it ut first in pencil. My digital sketches, except for an awesome seahorse I still don't know how I managed, turn out horribly.

But it's not just the drawing part. With proper preparation, painting my pictures with oils goes so much quicker. If my paints are thinned just enough (not hard to get right) they go on really smoothly and quickly. I mix the colors i most use and store them in good air tight containers. That and a wide choice of brushes and sponges and the paint just flies.

Having said that, I always add a few small finishing touches with Gimp. Darken the outlines, adjust colors a bits, sometimes a tidy digital border or frame. So I really depend on both media in the end.

***Oh, and Viking girl, when are we going to see more updates to Tempus?***