Digital vs. Traditional Painting
Digital technologies are the newest medium artists use to create or display their work. This digital art opened the scope of possibilities: virtual reality, visuals made from data, montages mixing video, photo and illustration… Digital painting is part of that huge phenomenon and our studio participates in various media like video games and movies. Everybody started on a physical canvas, so we spoke from experience about tools in this new form of art and the traditional one. Which one is more recommended when you want to become a professional?
The aim here wasn’t to talk about craft skills knowing that drawing a line with a digital pen or a real brush is not that different. Both digital and traditional arts require the same set of skills. If you are comfortable with IT, it is a bonus to adapt to the medium quicker. It took around a month to our teammates to get used to Photoshop’s basic functions and be able to go deeper, like managing textures. Adaptation also depends on the quality of your graphic tablet. Indeed, all of them don’t react instantly to your pen and you need to synchronize your moves and how it displays on the screen, it is part of the adaptation to the software.
We also talked about these “magical” functions on Photoshop. Do they have a benefic impact on your work? Let’s take the famous Ctrl+z which can easily erase your last actions. “It would be good to have it in real life” some said… you can conclude that this keyboard shortcut is very popular at our studio! It helps you expend your creativity and make you save a lot of time when you have a tight schedule. When you draw for yourself, it is a challenge not to use it anymore.
Several teammates avoid using it to improve their paintings, still it can be felt as a “torture.” The importance of layers was a debate as well: is it more comfortable to have few or many layers? For some, only two could be necessary, but for other each layer is special, but do many layers create order or chaos? Opinions are divided. For some, dividing the artwork is a sign of organization but it wasn’t the most popular point of view. Using them can also be a way to archive various stages of an art piece, but then it can get messy! These Photoshop functions are part of the digital medium and seem to give more freedom to our artists. Does the final render vary from a medium to the other? Even if you use the same art technic, imperfections make a traditional painting unique, but the smooth rendering of digital painting also has its charm.
Once drawn on a physical canvas, we can say that lines, being so hard to correct, are definitive. Digital painting deleted this problem, but some of us miss the feelings (and the constraints) brought by a traditional medium. Some paint traditionally during their free time or have a sketch book. The contact between the brush and the canvas was mentioned several times and some digital artists miss it so much that they glue a thin paper on their graphic tablet to still feel it!
Let’s not forget that technologies allow all artists either to scan or print their artworks and move from one medium to another. The possibilities linked to digital technologies haven’t yet been all explored, no one knows what the future holds...