How does working by hand differ from drawing with computer assistance? Are you using different parts of your brain when switching between rendering and work making techniques? Are they fundamentally different?

These are good questions, and they’re something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the course of this year.

If we were to tackle the first prompt, I do think that working digitally differs quite a lot from traditional, despite the plethora of overlap that lies between methods at a surface-level glance. Digital offers incredible breadth, accessibility, ease of use and often can provide support in areas that can be difficult to navigate for artists getting into unfamiliar techniques and rendering territory. It also offers a profoundly tempting trap while it does this. In many ways, digital can be the ultimate honeypot for catching artists and limiting their opportunities if they do not step out of that comfort zone.

This really comes in to play when you weigh the scariest (but often most valuable) aspect of trad media: the risk. If you make a dud call and biff it, the piece could very well be hooped. I think that’s terribly exciting sometimes, and even on high stakes work, the growth afforded by that has so much potential. When you inevitable make a mistake, it can provide something unexpected that actually functions as a moment of surprise or delight, or it gives you a challenge to fix and really makes you work your knowledge and forces experimentation to rein things back in. I find the ubiquity of the undo potential in digital limiting in comparison; by always having an out, you can hobble yourself creatively by never having to accept a modicum of risk in your practice. It’s extremely safe, and sometimes it’s sterile.

That being said, I champion trad media frequently but am totally willing to exploit the advantages of digital to make a tight deadline. The rapid turnaround, ease of physical technique replication with brushsets and texture tools can shave weeks off of certain projects compared with tackling them in realspace. I can deny that. Nobody can. But dang if it doesn’t sometimes feel like the Soylent of imagemaking when you just want some down & dirty home comfort cooking, yanno?

As for whether digital and physical interfacing uses different parts of the brain, who knows? I’ve seen studies cited that information retention is higher when note-taking by hand, and I tend to have a deeper connection with writing and journaling if I break out the nice pen and really spend time with it instead of raising my WPM count, but I’m not qualified to make anything more than anecdotal calls. I feel like I get more out of writing by hand, but I do love typing for writing fiction and essays, they just flow more easily. I wonder if that’s tapping some part of the brain that flows a little more slowly when I’m using a pen and paper?

At the end of the day, I do think there’s something grounding and special about having proficiency with tactile, physical techniques and tools. Digital means are incredibly powerful and can be used to accelerate your rendering and learning, but I usually find myself wanting to use them to practice for physical art. It just has that extra bit of romance to it, and honestly a lovingly rendered ink drawing, a mural, a gorgeous oil painting… they have a lot of pull against a .PSD file or a glossy print. To each their own though! God knows there’s enough going around to share.