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?

View Answers

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)

View Answers

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?

View Answers

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?

View Answers

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?

View Answers

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.)

View Answers
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

[sholio]

darn it, I meant to comment on your earlier post (nice art, by the way!) and then got sidetracked ...

But yeah, I've never even tried digital inking because it always looked like an unpleasant, time-consuming pain in the ass. The only situation in which I can see digital inking being worth it (for me anyway) would be on a piece that was going to be scaled up really big -- if it was intended to be made into a poster or something.

But I know artists who do all their inking digitally, and not only am I boggled that they have the patience for it, but I often find the results less pleasing to the eye (but then, aesthetically, I prefer a looser, sketchier, hatching-intensive style of inking as opposed to the slicker and more polished sort).

Having said that, I do use the computer throughout a lot of the process -- like the example you used of scanning and resizing/rearranging pencils; I don't know what I'd do with myself if I couldn't do that. :D And I letter comics on the computer and do a lot of my coloring that way. So maybe digital inking would not actually be as time-consuming and annoying as it always seemed to me. But generally, I do not like working with vector-based programs like Illustrator, whereas I like pixel-editing programs like Photoshop; I assume that in order to enjoy digital inking, you'd need a certain amount of enjoyment for using Illustrator (or various equivalents), but I'm not really fond of them.

[ratcreature]

I think many people who ink digitally just draw with a tablet. I usually did that when I inked digitally before. This last one was the first time I tried with the curves. But for example my icons I ink just drawing with a tablet. I choose that over inking on paper because for the icons I need crisp lines on very white background, and the times I tried scanning an inked version, the inking was faster on paper, but separating it from the in this case unwanted paper texture and remnants of the pencils via digital means takes as much or more extra time, than what the digital inking takes as extra effort.

And I'm glad someone liked that doodle *g*, there was a somewhat disheartening dearth of comments (i.e. zero) so far, though two people fav'ed it on dA.