Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

 

When it comes to “Digital vs Traditional”, I’m personally not on one side or another. I love digital art AND I love traditional art almost equally. Depending on what I’m doing, one type of art might be better suited than another type, but neither one is inherently “better” than the other. Every medium and every type of art has its pros and cons! But what are some of the pros and cons of working in a digital art space?

 

In this article we will cover the following topics:

PRO: Great for those with Limited Physical Space

CON: Technical Difficulties

PRO: Less waste and fewer continued costs

CON: No original artworks

PRO: Ease of Sharing Your Work

CON: Artwork is easier to duplicate

PRO: Corrections can be made at almost any time

CON: Can have a Higher Learning Curve

PRO: Ease of adding details and textures

CON: Less respect for digital work

 

Let’s look at some pros and cons!

 

 

PRO: Great for those with Limited Physical Space

Let’s face it: Some of us do not have a lot of physical space at our disposal. Whether you’re living in one room, or renting a small apartment, or any other number of things, not everyone has the space to store tons of canvases, pencils, paints, brushes, pastels, paper, frames, books, and all the other items that tend to collect when creating traditional art.

 

Digital art requires very little space to get started. You need some sort of electronic device- whether that be a phone, tablet, laptop, or computer- some software, and perhaps some USB thumb drives or an external harddrive. If you have a larger setup like a desktop computer you may need a desktop and a graphics tablet. But even if you need a desk, it’s still less of a space investment than storage for canvas and paints and all the things needed to create traditional art!

 

The photo below shows just one shelf in my “studio space” that just houses my supplies for matting and framing my art prints. This doesn’t even count my desk space for creating art, all the originals, and all the supplies that I need for when I do something traditional!

 

 

CON: Technical Difficulties

However, you can have lots of technical difficulties when working with technology. Running out of battery, power outages, corrupt files, hard drive crashes, software bugs, glitches, and so much more can and does go wrong. And unfortunately if your electronic device isn’t working then you can’t create anything! This problem doesn’t happen with traditional mediums that don’t require electricity.

PRO: Less waste and fewer continued costs

In the same way that you don’t need to store supplies, creating digital art also means that you don’t need to USE supplies! Once you purchase your software and input device, you usually don’t have more costs than that for creating digital art. However, paints run out, pencils get too short to use, canvases get used and can’t be reused (unless you paint over your work!), and everything needs to be replaced eventually. In comparison, a digital art program will never run out of your favorite color, and your favorite digital brushes don’t get ruined bristles!

 

This also means that digital art creates less waste. In digital art you’re not using reams of paper to create on, or throwing away empty plastic bottles of paint, or creating any of the other waste that traditional art entails!

 

 

CON: No Original Artworks

If you’re looking to sell your work, originals can be sold for hundreds of dollars more than prints in most cases. And some art lovers prefer originals to prints. However with digital art the only “original” is your file, which isn’t something that can be framed and hung on a wall! But when you paint on a canvas or draw on paper then that is worth more than a reproduction.

PRO: Ease of Sharing Your Work

In the Internet age, most artists are sharing their work on at least one social media site, and probably a few gallery sites and a personal website as well! When working in digital space, it’s very easy to share your finished work. Simply save a web-sized and low resolution version of your image, then upload it to the site of your choice.

 

This process is a bit more complicated when making traditional work, however. You usually need a scanner in order to digitize your work, at the very least. But if you work in a larger size and don’t have an expensive large-format scanner, you either need to pay for a shop to scan or photograph your work, scan it yourself in pieces and try to put them together digitally, or try to photograph the piece yourself. This can be quite a chore, and also expensive if you have to have a camera shop photograph or scan your large work.

 

 

CON: Artwork is easier to duplicate

Art theft has been rampant since the beginning of the internet, and it doesn’t look like the problem will be going away. Someone can right-click-save-as or screenshot your artwork from the internet and use it however they want if you aren’t careful with it. The best way to protect yourself is to sign and watermark your work and to only upload low-resolution files to the internet, but even these measures can only do so much.

 

And let’s not even get into the discussion about AI Art, which is an entirely different thing altogether!

 

 

PRO: Corrections can be made at almost any time

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been working on a traditional medium piece and messed up the inking right at the end. Or got a huge splotch of paint on something. Or spilled water all over my desk and ruined my illustration right at the end!

 

With digital art, however, you can make changes at nearly any time in the creation process! You can use layers to easily change colors of any part of your drawing without having to paint over anything. Even ‘ink’ lines can be erased and redrawn as many times as you want! The Liquify option in Clip Studio Paint can even push, pull, and resize entire parts of your image in seconds to correct proportions, like I’ve done in the screenshot below where the character’s hand is too small on the left.

 

 

CON: Can have a Higher Learning Curve

Depending on if you are switching to digital from traditional or starting your art journey with digital art, you are going to face certain challenges along the way. If you’ve never created digital art before, you may get completely overwhelmed with all the new things you need to learn just to sit down and start drawing. Thankfully the amount of knowledge that is out in the internet now makes figuring things out much easier now, but sometimes you don’t even know what you need to know to get started!

 

If you’re switching from traditional media to digital, there are other challenges that you’ll face as well. Using a digital tablet to paint on a screen takes a very different type of hand-eye-coordination than painting on canvas right in front of you. Even if you have a monitor tablet it can take getting used to because of the distance between the stylus tip and the screen thanks to the glass. The sheer number of digital brushes and endless colors can also be overwhelming at first.

 

 

PRO: Ease of Adding Details and Textures

Adding detail and textures, such as patterns to clothing, is so much easier when working digitally. Especially when you have access to the CSP Assets store, where tons of other CSP Users share their brushes, textures, and images for others to download and use. This can save a lot of time when compared to adding these details in traditional art. For instance, in the image below the pattern on the kimono were added thanks to a simple brush downloaded from CSP Assets, making the process of detailing the kimono take seconds instead of hours.

CON: Less Respect for Digital Art

Finally, there are some people who consider digital art to not be “real” art. This stigma has been around since the beginning of digital art programs, and I don’t know that it will ever go away. Some people think that creating art digitally requires just a few button presses and you can have a masterpiece in just a few seconds. But there are many times that I’ve spent longer on a digital illustration than I would have if I had done the same piece in traditional media.

 

Digital art still requires just as much skill and dedication to make it look good as traditional art does. Yes, some tasks are easier, as we’ve already discussed. But there are still challenges, just like there are to any medium. However some people still look down on digital artists as “cheaters” or “not real artists”, and that isn’t fair at all.

 

 

Conclusion

The bottom line is that no type of art is perfect, whether that be traditional art, digital art, animation, singing, dancing, writing, etc. Every medium and type of expression has its ups and downs, its strengths and its weaknesses. The most important thing is to pick how you want to express your own artistic vision and share it with the world!

 

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com