So I’ve been drawing with digital for the past few years. Mostly because I didn’t want to pay for oil paint, but also because it’s so convenient.
In digital drawing, you still need the basic drawing skills and knowledge as any other medium of art; you still need to be able to draw, and understand the color.
However there’s one thing digital drawing has and the others don’t. You can undo with digital.
The power of undo on digital format is great. You can erase everything without a trace. You don’t need to think twice before pressing the brush on the canvas. For example, sometimes you notice the combinations of colors are not exactly what you initially imagined. In that case, you can just press Command + Z keys to make them disappear and start over. By doing this you are able to experiment with different combinations of color. Moreover, undo is not the only thing that digital can do but traditional can’t. So in this sense, you could say digital drawing is superior to the traditional ways of drawing or painting.
And here’s my point of this post:
“But is it though?”
Here I’m talking about art as a whole. I’ve been using digital drawing softwares because there were aspects that I loved so much about them such as being able to depict any color I wanted and save my palette indefinitely. I can separate layers so I can paint under outlines. I can enlarge or make it small to check the whole picture from distance without getting up from my chair. Oh, now I remember, digital drawings doesn’t get wet or dry. The picture only gets smudged when you specifically use the smudge feature.
I think digital drawing is a good medium of art if you want to draw as “perfectly” as possible. When I paint in oil, I’m severely limited with the characteristics of how each pigment behave, or how a drop of cadmium red ruins everything, or how linseed oil makes colors look different.
I forgot about all these about oil painting after the few years of drawing mostly on digital. Do you know what’s crazy? I actually missed those limitations, and I didn’t even know it. Now that I think about it, you don’t really have to draw things perfectly, not to mention the philosophical question of if a man can ever be perfect. I don’t think all detailed drawings are interesting art.
As I expected, I made some great mess painting in oil with the first painting in a while, but I created some interesting paintings. I don’t think I was limited by the medium, it was more like I was guided in certain ways, in which you can only achieve with oil paint. And I could go on and go on.
With that said, limitations in general are not necessarily a bad thing. Think about why many musicians only use certain instruments like guitars to compose a song. Instead of using traditional, physical instruments, they can also just use music software to make music from scratch. They have far more libraries of instruments to choose from, and they have the total control when making music that way. So why use the guitar, right?
I don’t think it’s a matter of the intuitiveness of the physical format, either. I think it has to do with the chaotic nature that occurs when you have too many choices. It’s easy to get lost when you’re given too many of them. Considering that, limitations are not something that actually limit your skills, but they are meant to be used as a guidance.
If there was the ocean of art, creating art with no limitations would be like blindly diving in only to find yourself lost at the sea. Whereas creating with limitations would be like you could see the path and which direction to go. The joke is that you’ll still get downed with your creativity in the end because art is endless. But with the guide, you’ll manage to move further.
I even think that being unable to undo is not oil painting’s flaw, it’s how you should create things. I think art is not about the artwork but rather about the artist him/herself. What’s a personality without flaws? Sadly you are less likely to see it on a digital drawing. I think it’s great that a painting can preserve the artist’s struggle and mistakes.
What you see on a oil painting is layers of paint that were painted over and over. If the artist makes a mistake, then he/she have to base a new session on the mistake. I think oil painting enables us artists to explore on the canvas. The nature of being able to embrace mistakes in oil painting is what fuels the artists to create a unique art in my opinion.
this is an old painting I made a few years ago