I finally gave up on my old way of sketching with a tablet

For years I drew my designs on a screen, but last month I took a class in Portland where the instructor made us use charcoal and newsprint for the first hour. The physical mess and the way the charcoal smudged forced me to think about shape and movement in a totally different way, and my digital work got WAY better. Has anyone else had a similar breakthrough by switching back to a traditional medium?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan.jason1d ago

Sounds like a cool class but honestly feels like a bit much. People act like going analog is some magic fix. You got better cause you practiced more, not cause charcoal is special. I switched to pen and paper for a month and my lines just got scratchier. Sometimes a new tool is just a new tool.

maxl9323h ago

Hot take: tools are just excuses. Morgan's got a point. A bad pencil won't make you a good artist. But sometimes the limits of a tool force a different kind of problem solving. That watercolor bleed Charles mentioned is a perfect example. You can't Ctrl+Z a real spill. You have to work with the mistake, which teaches a different skill than just learning a new brush setting. It's not about the charcoal being magic. It's about your brain getting stuck in a digital workflow and needing a hard reset to see the problem fresh. A new tool alone does nothing, but a new process might.

charles8361d ago

Honestly, my buddy had the same thing happen with watercolors. He does all his comic art digitally, but he got super stuck on flat colors. He messed around with cheap paints for a weekend, just making a huge wet mess on his kitchen table. Tbh, seeing how the colors bled and mixed by accident totally changed how he does his digital shading now. He says he stopped fighting the program so much and just lets things flow.