payoff for your time effort

[ratcreature]

My latest tedious digital experience made me curious about the "time efficiency" of digital vs. traditional media for people overall. Obviously there are some things that are really easy/fast digitally compared to doing it by hand, e.g. messing with the color balance, or after you are almost finished with the details it becomes apparent that you failed to notice that a head is disproportionately large. Select and scale with some minor re-merging effort is all fixing the latter takes digitally, whereas you have to start over by hand. But when looking at the whole process I often find that doing something digitally takes me longer than on paper (and I'm slow there already), even if I take into account the beloved undo and that corrections go much faster. Of course that could be just a matter of practice, but then it's not as if I paint traditionally all that often either, and digital stuff seems to have a really steep and frustrating learning curve.

Of course you can always mix both to take advantage, e.g. do a sketch in pencil, scan it, resize and rearrange stuff digitally, then base the drawing on that, or do an initial rough color sketch digitally, mess around with color sliders until you like the mood, then do the painting traditionally, then scan it and do a touch up digitally etc. But still, a poll about when you don't mix the two.

Poll #5337 traditional vs. digital

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

View Respondents

for initial sketching (whether a study or the base of later picture), what is faster for you?

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traditional media (i.e. physical pigments applied to surfaces in some manner)
3 (60.0%)

digital (i.e. whatever software you like best for a task: GIMP, Photoshop, Painter, ArtRage...)
1 (20.0%)

no difference
1 (20.0%)

don't know/can't say (b/c you never keep track of time, have only ever used one method for this, always mix both...)
0 (0.0%)

for a fully rendered drawing, what is faster for you? (presuming about equally detailed/skilled results are the goal)

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traditional
1 (20.0%)

digital
3 (60.0%)

no difference
1 (20.0%)

don't know
0 (0.0%)

for inking line art, what is faster for you?

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traditional
2 (40.0%)

digital
3 (60.0%)

no difference
0 (0.0%)

don't know
0 (0.0%)

for coloring line art, what is faster for you?

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traditional
1 (20.0%)

digital
4 (80.0%)

no difference
0 (0.0%)

don't know
0 (0.0%)

for a fully rendered painting, what is faster for you?

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traditional
2 (40.0%)

digital
1 (20.0%)

no difference
0 (0.0%)

don't know
2 (40.0%)

how important is such time/effort efficiency on average when choosing your medium for an artwork? 10 meaning "most important", 0 meaning "not important" compared to other consideration (e.g. wanting to have a physical object, not wanting to have a mess with paints everywhere, having some effect you can only get digitally etc.)

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Mean: 3.20 Median: 3 Std. Dev 1.33

0		0 (0.0%)
1		1 (20.0%)
2		0 (0.0%)
3		2 (40.0%)
4		1 (20.0%)
5		1 (20.0%)
6		0 (0.0%)
7		0 (0.0%)
8		0 (0.0%)
9		0 (0.0%)
10		0 (0.0%)

Comments

[astridv]

Well, to be exact, there still is an extra step between sketch and inked version - my original sketches usually aren't clean enough. Basically instead of inking the sketch over a light box I place a transparent matte film on it and do a quick trace with pencil, which I then scan and convert into ink. Using matte film results in a much smoother, cleaner line than you get with paper.

Sometimes I clean up the basic sketches with white-out and eraser to save that one step but that usually takes longer than just tracing the whole thing, and the result doesn't quite look like an actual inked lineart.