I came to my art late, first getting a Ph.D in English, then studying art at night and weekends and every spare moment, and I have been flabbergasted by how skilled artists with incredibly energetic and distinctive styles whittle their work down to this common denominator of “acceptable” and “professional.” So EVERYTHING starts looking the same, pumped out slick, shorn of all quirk. This was an honest piece.
I almost always start traditional with sketches and concepts and then finish digitally. That said, I did shift a few years ago from Adobe Illustrator to digital tools that let me create in a more analog manner.
This really resonated with me as a beginner illustrator. I often draw digitally (even though my heart wants to work with traditional media) simply because of time. There’s definitely something to unpack about financial privilege and low pay for artists that is almost forcing us into working faster, and the increasing expectation of publishers who influenced by the fast-paced world we live in want things fast and easily changeable. I think we all want to keep our artistic integrity, but often our life demands (caring responsibilities, disability, financial worries) mean we have to make compromises.
A friend put it very well that "it's not our fault that capitalism values our work less," haha! It is a balancing act - making a living vs. being true to the artistic spirit!
I switched to digital a few years ago, and it was mainly because when you are working on a deadline with editors who require drastic changes, it’s a lot easier to fix. I do miss the smell of working with pen and India ink though.
Thanks for sharing this! It's a great question for how we choose to work, and great points about deadlines/time available. At some point, people probably felt like using a brush instead of your fingers or a stick was "cheating" and led to inferior results. Though, there are also tradeoffs between media (mediums?). Some would probably say that AI is just another "tool" like art software, pens, and brushes. So maybe the right question is whether you're outsourcing decisions (to the AI, to the popular commercial aesthetic).
Also, woah, "my hope and my joy / I hope you enjoyed"...
I want to like painting digitally, as a new mom it’s such a time saver, but I rarely get the effect that I want. It’s a medium I just haven’t figured out yet.
re: digital art. I began working in digital art and still mainly work in digital art because of my tendinitis. Drawing for long periods without digital aids is just impossible for me from a physical limitations standpoint. I sometimes create art non-digitally, but just for myself for the pure fun; if I tried to do entire book without digital aids, I doubt I would be in this career....not because of laziness (as is sometimes assumed about digital art) but because I would be physically UNABLE to, at least not within the usual deadlines.
Agh, this is so true!! Whatever allows you to create what you want is the best tool. Sort of like that photography quote, "The best camera is the one you have with you."
Ahh loved this. To be honest, I don't love making art, exactly— rather, I like making funny things and storytelling and that often comes in the form of art, and often is digital. But I do love painting, not just for the result but also the process of it: fighting with the pigment and wet/dryness, finding unexpected shifts and mistakes that turn out to be wonderful or horrible, carving shape and volume, strokes coalescing into something "real". But. It's hard haha. I'm not confident about always achieving a "good" final result, which is fine for experiments and personal work, but makes me very hesitant to use it for paid work :/
Increasingly, I also find myself more drawn to traditional work (or at least digital-with-convincing-traditional-textures) as well as "messier" pieces that show a human hand when looking at other people's work. For a long time as a hobbyist I was fixated on realism as the pinnacle of skill, and it was only when I started to think about art more seriously (or maybe that causation is reversed) that I began to appreciate how amazing looseness and imperfection and stylization are, even ones that aren't to my personal taste, and also how hard those skills are to develop! Anyway, I digress haha. Tl;dr: definitely think traditional media will always be valuable and would love for us all to be able to do more of the type of work we enjoy most!
this is a question I've been battling with on an almost daily basis for the last ten years! I find it very difficult to get the same spontaneity and liveliness of line working digitally... I do still believe it's possible... It's just I think the option to endlessly improve and revise can end up self-sabotaging. Maybe analog v digital is a bit like tv nowadays: we have so much choice we waste a whole load of time trying all the options and often end up disatisfied anyway. In the old days with four channels we just got on with it.
Anyway, everything in this piece felt very familiar! Zoe, the work I love the most of yours is always the doodly, sketchy stuff, it has so much of your personality in it. And that's what makes your work so special and unique, just like Quentin Blake or Sempé. Any one of your sketchy paper examples you put in the article I could absolutely imagine published in magazines or anywhere else. I don't think you need to worry there. But I totally get the crisis this kind of self-analysis brings on.
Personally, I've always loved super clean drawings, but then I've also always loved super scribbly sketchy inky messy drawings too. Recently I looked back at my portfolio in a similar way to how you described it and realised that what I mostly do falls into the sketchy, loose and scribbly camp. Yet professionally I've been trying to project an image of myself as someone who does super clean (almost entirely digital) lines. I enjoy doing that style but I've realised it's not what people respond to most, nor what I naturally do for myself; it's like I've been trying to fight against my natural way of drawing. So i've decided to stop doing that and see if I don't make my life easier.
...The self-doubt might take longer to beat though!
Thanks so much for your very kind comments. And it totally does feel like TV to me - endless option when creativity does benefit from some restraint. Best of luck finding your groove!
I’ve been casually drawing my whole life and i got an ipad just to see if it changed my relationship to drawing (aka would I draw more??) and also I was tired of wasting paper on crappy drawings… I’ve made some things I really like on my iPad but I usually keep it simple, and when I go back to painting I feel out of practice, which I hate. They are all different mediums accomplishing different things, but I agree I feel like there’s a polish on the iPad that is not ACTUALLY how I draw/paint.
I love Quentin Blake now, but I didn’t like him when I was a kid. I found the pictures too messy! I am sure that says something absolutely terrible about me.
I do my comic strip on heavyweight cartridge. Expensive paper. And the lines are tight and not as I’d really like. The work for my Substack and books is on cheap layout paper. When I make a mistake, it’s easy to trace over and over and over again. Quentin Blake works in a similar way with many scraps of paper, often discarded.
I love both your styles of work though – it works both ways!
Hahaha - we couldn't all be artistically enlightened children! :P But it definitely speaks to how what you do won't ever resonate with everyone, so you may as well do what you do best!
I came to my art late, first getting a Ph.D in English, then studying art at night and weekends and every spare moment, and I have been flabbergasted by how skilled artists with incredibly energetic and distinctive styles whittle their work down to this common denominator of “acceptable” and “professional.” So EVERYTHING starts looking the same, pumped out slick, shorn of all quirk. This was an honest piece.
Loved the newsletter. Thanks for sharing.
It is the new eternal question.
I almost always start traditional with sketches and concepts and then finish digitally. That said, I did shift a few years ago from Adobe Illustrator to digital tools that let me create in a more analog manner.
ach, I love this, and it's exactly what I need to hear rn!
So glad it could help! <3
This really resonated with me as a beginner illustrator. I often draw digitally (even though my heart wants to work with traditional media) simply because of time. There’s definitely something to unpack about financial privilege and low pay for artists that is almost forcing us into working faster, and the increasing expectation of publishers who influenced by the fast-paced world we live in want things fast and easily changeable. I think we all want to keep our artistic integrity, but often our life demands (caring responsibilities, disability, financial worries) mean we have to make compromises.
A friend put it very well that "it's not our fault that capitalism values our work less," haha! It is a balancing act - making a living vs. being true to the artistic spirit!
I switched to digital a few years ago, and it was mainly because when you are working on a deadline with editors who require drastic changes, it’s a lot easier to fix. I do miss the smell of working with pen and India ink though.
Thanks for sharing this! It's a great question for how we choose to work, and great points about deadlines/time available. At some point, people probably felt like using a brush instead of your fingers or a stick was "cheating" and led to inferior results. Though, there are also tradeoffs between media (mediums?). Some would probably say that AI is just another "tool" like art software, pens, and brushes. So maybe the right question is whether you're outsourcing decisions (to the AI, to the popular commercial aesthetic).
Also, woah, "my hope and my joy / I hope you enjoyed"...
Haha - the unintended poetry of frenetic substack posts!!
And that is a great way to frame the question, especially given technological advances - something we'll have to keep asking ourselves!
I like sketching traditional over digital. But a illustration is a digital must instead.
I want to like painting digitally, as a new mom it’s such a time saver, but I rarely get the effect that I want. It’s a medium I just haven’t figured out yet.
Great post.
re: digital art. I began working in digital art and still mainly work in digital art because of my tendinitis. Drawing for long periods without digital aids is just impossible for me from a physical limitations standpoint. I sometimes create art non-digitally, but just for myself for the pure fun; if I tried to do entire book without digital aids, I doubt I would be in this career....not because of laziness (as is sometimes assumed about digital art) but because I would be physically UNABLE to, at least not within the usual deadlines.
Agh, this is so true!! Whatever allows you to create what you want is the best tool. Sort of like that photography quote, "The best camera is the one you have with you."
Ahh loved this. To be honest, I don't love making art, exactly— rather, I like making funny things and storytelling and that often comes in the form of art, and often is digital. But I do love painting, not just for the result but also the process of it: fighting with the pigment and wet/dryness, finding unexpected shifts and mistakes that turn out to be wonderful or horrible, carving shape and volume, strokes coalescing into something "real". But. It's hard haha. I'm not confident about always achieving a "good" final result, which is fine for experiments and personal work, but makes me very hesitant to use it for paid work :/
Increasingly, I also find myself more drawn to traditional work (or at least digital-with-convincing-traditional-textures) as well as "messier" pieces that show a human hand when looking at other people's work. For a long time as a hobbyist I was fixated on realism as the pinnacle of skill, and it was only when I started to think about art more seriously (or maybe that causation is reversed) that I began to appreciate how amazing looseness and imperfection and stylization are, even ones that aren't to my personal taste, and also how hard those skills are to develop! Anyway, I digress haha. Tl;dr: definitely think traditional media will always be valuable and would love for us all to be able to do more of the type of work we enjoy most!
this is a question I've been battling with on an almost daily basis for the last ten years! I find it very difficult to get the same spontaneity and liveliness of line working digitally... I do still believe it's possible... It's just I think the option to endlessly improve and revise can end up self-sabotaging. Maybe analog v digital is a bit like tv nowadays: we have so much choice we waste a whole load of time trying all the options and often end up disatisfied anyway. In the old days with four channels we just got on with it.
Anyway, everything in this piece felt very familiar! Zoe, the work I love the most of yours is always the doodly, sketchy stuff, it has so much of your personality in it. And that's what makes your work so special and unique, just like Quentin Blake or Sempé. Any one of your sketchy paper examples you put in the article I could absolutely imagine published in magazines or anywhere else. I don't think you need to worry there. But I totally get the crisis this kind of self-analysis brings on.
Personally, I've always loved super clean drawings, but then I've also always loved super scribbly sketchy inky messy drawings too. Recently I looked back at my portfolio in a similar way to how you described it and realised that what I mostly do falls into the sketchy, loose and scribbly camp. Yet professionally I've been trying to project an image of myself as someone who does super clean (almost entirely digital) lines. I enjoy doing that style but I've realised it's not what people respond to most, nor what I naturally do for myself; it's like I've been trying to fight against my natural way of drawing. So i've decided to stop doing that and see if I don't make my life easier.
...The self-doubt might take longer to beat though!
Thanks so much for your very kind comments. And it totally does feel like TV to me - endless option when creativity does benefit from some restraint. Best of luck finding your groove!
We are in such similar boats! 🙌 I’m always chasing that wobbly line!
I absolutely love this
I’ve been casually drawing my whole life and i got an ipad just to see if it changed my relationship to drawing (aka would I draw more??) and also I was tired of wasting paper on crappy drawings… I’ve made some things I really like on my iPad but I usually keep it simple, and when I go back to painting I feel out of practice, which I hate. They are all different mediums accomplishing different things, but I agree I feel like there’s a polish on the iPad that is not ACTUALLY how I draw/paint.
I love Quentin Blake now, but I didn’t like him when I was a kid. I found the pictures too messy! I am sure that says something absolutely terrible about me.
I do my comic strip on heavyweight cartridge. Expensive paper. And the lines are tight and not as I’d really like. The work for my Substack and books is on cheap layout paper. When I make a mistake, it’s easy to trace over and over and over again. Quentin Blake works in a similar way with many scraps of paper, often discarded.
I love both your styles of work though – it works both ways!
Hahaha - we couldn't all be artistically enlightened children! :P But it definitely speaks to how what you do won't ever resonate with everyone, so you may as well do what you do best!
I also just discovered the joyful abandon in Rán Flygenring’s work.. similar school of line work sooo good!