Let’s have a look to advantages and disadvantages of digital art, compared to traditional art.

I’ll go over some of the advantages and disadvantages of digital art and I’ll keep it simple so that you can have a basic understanding of how different is digital art and what is benefits of it. And what you should expect from digital art if you are a traditional artist and want to try digital art. Let’s start with the advantages.

Advantages

Layers

Of course the first advantage is being able to use digital layers. Which is impossible to practice in traditional art.

Being able to use these digital layers gives you opportunity of making changes on your paint in a non destructive way. You have no chance to even imitate layers in traditional art. Let’s say you want to paint a character. You can create a layer for the sketch and then create another layer for your base paint and then another one for the shading and details. It is up to you and there is no limit.You can switch back and forth between all the layers and work on them in a non destructive way, which gives you a unique form freedom.

Undo Feature

Second advantage is the undo feature. You made mistake? It is not a problem. Just hit “control+z” and it will undo your last action and you are ready to go on. In traditional art if you made a mistake you made it. There is no way to undo it. I wish there was a undo button in real life but unfortunately this is something unique to digital art.

Storing and saving paintings

In digital art, storing, saving and transferring your pieces are really easy. They are actually just a couple of megabytes, nothing much. But in traditional art that’s not the case because your painting will fill up a physical space. And if you are doing like oil paintings and working with big canvases, storing your paintings could be a problem. And plus you can continue to work on your saved painting whenever and wherever you want. You can transfer your paintings digitally and print them. There is a lot of opportunities.

Disadvantages

Feeling

The first disadvantage that I will mention is the feeling. It doesn’t matter if you have a regular graphic tablet or a display graphic tablet, in one case you will draw on a plastic surface and in the other case you will be drawing on a glass pane and it wouldn’t feel as comfortable as drawing traditionally. Of course you get use to this feeling by the time but it will never be like traditional. Drawing with a pencil and paper feels way more comfortable and natural.

Potential of losing your work

This happened to me a couple of times. Eventually you are working on computer and either your software or your computer can crash and you can lose all your work. And there is no way to recover your work. Even though this looks like unlikely to happen, it is really annoying for this to happen once. I lost my work while working on a piece because the software that I was using crashed. You can prevent this form happening by constantly saving your work.

I hope you enjoyed and this was helpful. Thanks for reading and stay with peace.