Hi, Folks:
Just wondering how truly necessary it is for today's illustrators to
have "digital skills," in terms of needing to know how to use various
software packages like, I dunno, Photoshop, Illustrator, et cetera.
I ask because as someone with professional-level free-hand
illustration skills (I don't make my living as one but definitely
could if I wanted to "hustle" and network in order to get gigs) it
seems that simply drawing something myself and scanning it in is so
much easier than having to learn how to use various applications.
Even once having learned them (i.e., having developed some level of
competency) using a computer seems such a round-about way of doing
something that often is more natural with pencil and paper.
I'm not talking about CAD applications, mind you, in doing technical
drawings, nor animation for which I can see time-saving benefits, but
general illustrations, even general graphic design jobs...I love
computer technology and was fascinated by the Commodore Amiga back in
the late '80s when they helped put desktop publi****ng in the popular
lexicon, but in working on my own upcoming website I seem to find that
simple drawing something and scanning it in is so much easier than
wrangling with polygons and shading and so forth...and I think that
even if I were a master digital artist for most illustrations it is
just so much quicker, with a lot more control, to take pencil/ink/
paint to paper....
(Of course, I'm only talking about web images here, which usually
needn't be especially high-res and so forth....)
I guess I'm trying to determine if people with actual drawing skills
(namely, of the photo-realistic kind) really need a lot of these
drawing programs...again, I don't, because I don't actually make my
living as an illustrator, but in illustrating my own upcoming website
the question does occur to me, just how much digital skills would be
necessary....
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