Digital vs. Traditional

Many people are drifting towards digital art rather than traditional due to the advancements in technology. 

Visual art is an ever-shifting medium for expression; new techniques, materials, and ideas come out constantly. Recently, digital art has been spreading through the internet. It is widely available, cheap in the long term, and easy to share. However, what separates it from traditional?

First of all, traditional art is not just painting; it encompasses three-dimensional art and two-dimensional art. For three-dimensional art, you can only get so far with mockups on apps; for clay, you cannot truly mockup clay sculptures because it reacts differently to the different temperatures and pigments that you apply to its surface. Objects do not necessarily react the way we expect them to, making traditional, hands-on work valuable for learning. Besides, certain mediums cannot currently exist in digital art, such as watercolor. It is too complex and unpredictable to translate through an IPad and pixels. Similarly, it is hard to replicate differently textured papers onto a digital medium. 

Digital art is more focused on two-dimensional paintings using textured brushes. Recently digital art is coveted because of its use in animation, design, and other fields that artists pursue. It is much easier to store information inside a small tablet than to carry around massive plans and sketches. It is also easier to share drawings and paintings because they are easy to email and post on social media; with traditional art, art can be much harder to share. Some artists do take advantage of that and insist on galleries where photography is not allowed to provoke a feeling of intimacy only to see the art piece in real life and not online. It is also easier to fix “mistakes” by simply clicking the back button; in watercolors or colored pencils, it is hard to erase the unwanted and unintentional. 

Digital art is an entirely different experience than traditional art. Since it doesn’t encompass classic art, it would be closer to another medium under visual art than a competitor to a more conventional art style. Traditional art cannot be genuinely copied, which renders it much more valuable. Digital art is used in many animations and films to generate drawings without photographing work later more quickly. Which medium do you prefer to use? What do you think about the line between “traditional” and “digital”? 

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