@ascension's post on Artfol
What i have learned from recent observation of young artists who have learned art from a very young age only digitally and are now trying to delve into traditional materials (often due to portfolio reasons):
START EARLY ENOUGH KIDS, PLAN IN T I M E AND DONT LET FRUSTRATION OR EGO RULE YOU.
People need to realize that to them, there will be a HUGE perceived gap of quality and ability in the beginning, and a surprising amount of people does not seem to be prepared for this.
Digital and traditional, at least to me, is like the difference between hand sewing a beautiful skirt and sewing it with an art nouveau automated sewing machine. Both are the same thing but require a completely different approach to the same mechanismn that requires a different set of skill for each.
- after years of serious digital drawing you come with a certain amount of general skill. Anatomy, composition, colours and light. These are largely transcribable from one medium to another and will be visible in your traditional art as well, though in the beginning not as polished as in your preferred medium. These are the fabrics, the colour and the cut you are choosing for your skirt. No matter how you make it in the end, it all has the same ingredients.
- after said years of slowly perfecting your digital craft you now come with the skillset specific to it; sure handling of the brushes and layers and accessible drawing tools. (This point is also applicable to any and all handiworks and skills we learn during our lives.) The problem is that you are no longer aware of how specific this skillset is, and how long it actually took you to learn it. Been drawing in procreate for three years, no real stints into other apps or other media? Congratulations, you're good at procreate, now grab an aisle and a brush and prepare for all of your skills to plummet back to where they were at 1.5 years ago (at least that is roughly the timeline i watch in myself. However I have also observed that the skill gap in-between media seems to drastically dwindle the longer someone has been making art in general.).
The bigger the gap between the media you are switching between is the larger will be your skill gap.
When i learned drawing , after two years i switched from graphite pencils to coloured pencils. I filled the skill gap within 2-3 months. I was a pencil/ marker/oil paint artist for 7 years WITHOUT EVER MIXING ANY OF THESE. it was either or. Then i started clay figures and, uh. Suffice to say, after two years I've made leaps in quality, but if you'd tell me to draw a booba with copics, it'd look scrumptialitious and if you'd tell me to form one with clay you'd begin to worry about late stage breast cancer. thankfully I am well assured in my years of practice that i DO in fact know where the ribcage dips in, the clay is just too stupid to do what i want.
- Sometimes it's okay to blame the equipment and just the damn stars instead of your own abilities. If you've drawn your ocs face 5 million times over the last year but today he just looks like a potato, rest assured, it's not because you've suddenly lost the ability to draw forever. It's just not TRANSCIBING well from your brain to your hand today.
One of my younger friends who i almost count as an iPad baby (bruh, between him and generation nokia flip phone (me) are only 6 years) held one of my copics for the first time recently and after half an hour concluded he had no idea how i was doing this and he was obviously too stupid for this. Bro, the last 6 years you've been tapping away on my screen and I've been fighting with refills, now when we switch media it looks like a toddler drew it on either side because we are NOT USED TO IT.Nov 11, 2023
START EARLY ENOUGH KIDS, PLAN IN T I M E AND DONT LET FRUSTRATION OR EGO RULE YOU.
People need to realize that to them, there will be a HUGE perceived gap of quality and ability in the beginning, and a surprising amount of people does not seem to be prepared for this.
Digital and traditional, at least to me, is like the difference between hand sewing a beautiful skirt and sewing it with an art nouveau automated sewing machine. Both are the same thing but require a completely different approach to the same mechanismn that requires a different set of skill for each.
- after years of serious digital drawing you come with a certain amount of general skill. Anatomy, composition, colours and light. These are largely transcribable from one medium to another and will be visible in your traditional art as well, though in the beginning not as polished as in your preferred medium. These are the fabrics, the colour and the cut you are choosing for your skirt. No matter how you make it in the end, it all has the same ingredients.
- after said years of slowly perfecting your digital craft you now come with the skillset specific to it; sure handling of the brushes and layers and accessible drawing tools. (This point is also applicable to any and all handiworks and skills we learn during our lives.) The problem is that you are no longer aware of how specific this skillset is, and how long it actually took you to learn it. Been drawing in procreate for three years, no real stints into other apps or other media? Congratulations, you're good at procreate, now grab an aisle and a brush and prepare for all of your skills to plummet back to where they were at 1.5 years ago (at least that is roughly the timeline i watch in myself. However I have also observed that the skill gap in-between media seems to drastically dwindle the longer someone has been making art in general.).
The bigger the gap between the media you are switching between is the larger will be your skill gap.
When i learned drawing , after two years i switched from graphite pencils to coloured pencils. I filled the skill gap within 2-3 months. I was a pencil/ marker/oil paint artist for 7 years WITHOUT EVER MIXING ANY OF THESE. it was either or. Then i started clay figures and, uh. Suffice to say, after two years I've made leaps in quality, but if you'd tell me to draw a booba with copics, it'd look scrumptialitious and if you'd tell me to form one with clay you'd begin to worry about late stage breast cancer. thankfully I am well assured in my years of practice that i DO in fact know where the ribcage dips in, the clay is just too stupid to do what i want.
- Sometimes it's okay to blame the equipment and just the damn stars instead of your own abilities. If you've drawn your ocs face 5 million times over the last year but today he just looks like a potato, rest assured, it's not because you've suddenly lost the ability to draw forever. It's just not TRANSCIBING well from your brain to your hand today.
One of my younger friends who i almost count as an iPad baby (bruh, between him and generation nokia flip phone (me) are only 6 years) held one of my copics for the first time recently and after half an hour concluded he had no idea how i was doing this and he was obviously too stupid for this. Bro, the last 6 years you've been tapping away on my screen and I've been fighting with refills, now when we switch media it looks like a toddler drew it on either side because we are NOT USED TO IT.Nov 11, 2023
Comments
Therefore: a little more POSITIVITY and TRUST in your own skills, kids. Coupled with actually taking the time you need it will go all the way, believe me.
Perfectionist culture is a capitalist conformist marketing lie.
I know that in many aspects digital and traditional art seem to be worlds removed from each other, much like Rembrandts paintings and the goddamn taped banana, but in opposite to those, they're really not.
It just SEEMS this way online and in the art world because there is such a massive ideological divide between them that has been created by toxic purity culture over the last decade. I see digital and traditional art not even as different art movements, as many especially elder artists interestingly seem to do; digital is simply a new tool, like a newly discovered colour.
If you actually pay close attention to all the tutorials you will quickly realize that when switching between digital and traditional it is not an actual new SKILL you have to learn; rather how you implement your existing skill into the new mechanic.
- here is the tricky part: this takes a shit ton of time and patience and the more limited to a specific medium you were before, the longer and harder it gets and the lower you have to start (yes, this applies to young Teenagers who are always praised to being quick adapters too.) AND you will have to work out things that you normally can do easily completely anew.
You will run into practical issues thst you have fixed in your preferred medium years ago and it will be irritating and humiliating and leave you seriously questioning your ability as an artist.
Perfectionist culture is a capitalist conformist marketing lie.
I know that in many aspects digital and traditional art seem to be worlds removed from each other, much like Rembrandts paintings and the goddamn taped banana, but in opposite to those, they're really not.
It just SEEMS this way online and in the art world because there is such a massive ideological divide between them that has been created by toxic purity culture over the last decade. I see digital and traditional art not even as different art movements, as many especially elder artists interestingly seem to do; digital is simply a new tool, like a newly discovered colour.
If you actually pay close attention to all the tutorials you will quickly realize that when switching between digital and traditional it is not an actual new SKILL you have to learn; rather how you implement your existing skill into the new mechanic.
- here is the tricky part: this takes a shit ton of time and patience and the more limited to a specific medium you were before, the longer and harder it gets and the lower you have to start (yes, this applies to young Teenagers who are always praised to being quick adapters too.) AND you will have to work out things that you normally can do easily completely anew.
You will run into practical issues thst you have fixed in your preferred medium years ago and it will be irritating and humiliating and leave you seriously questioning your ability as an artist.
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