I honestly fucking hate the traditional vs digital art divide and the elitists who make each one exclusionary against the other. Neither is easier than the other, and comparing them, while not as close to the apples and oranges arguments as I’d like for this topic, may as well be close enough. There are things you can to with traditional art that you can’t do with digital art, and vice versa. There are tons of people who are intensely skilled in one who have never once touched the other, and even people intensely skilled in one who are absolute garbage fires at the other, just because they are intensely different worlds. However, there are also people, myself included, who breach both worlds and do just fine with both. Despite being adept with both, I can’t say which one is easier, I can just say which one I have a preference for, and that’s digital. It doesn’t waste paper or use up my pens, and it doesn’t leave a mess behind for me to clean up afterward.

Despite their differences, they go hand in hand like strawberries and cream. Do you know how I learned to be a digital artist? I applied what I learned from traditional art. How did I learn to be a traditional painter? I applied what I learned from digital art. I practiced my digital art by sketching traditionally and finishing it digitally. I practiced my traditional art by drawing and painting all on one layer digitally. Doing these things made me a more rounded artist, and for that I’m thankful.

Because I can recognise this, though, it makes me bitterly angry when I see people shitting on digital artists for doing Inktober digitally. I’m not doing Inktober digitally because it’s easier, it’s because I know that there’s no fucking difference between doing traditionally or digitally, you still end up with art in the end, which brings me to my final point, which is the simple choice of wording in “traditional” and “digital”.

To say that something is “traditional” is to imply that it’s the “normal” way of doing it. To say that there’s the “traditional” way juxtaposed to anything else implies that the other option is “not normal”. As I’ve stated, there are artists who do things one way having never once touched the other. Take a look at one artist on YouTube, Borodante. He’s a digital painter by profession, and recently reached 100,000 subscribers, and to celebrate, he did his first painting with real paint. He spent the entire video lamenting how he had no idea what he was doing, but consider that using “traditional” methods is not “traditional” for him. His “traditional”, his “normal” way is digital painting. I’m not saying this to try to cry that “artistic methods are a social construct” or anything like that, what I’m saying is that everyone has their method, and if it’s not yours, who are you to judge?

So if you’re going to sit back and deny digital artists the satisfaction of doing Inktober digitally, here’s an idea that’s truly groundbreaking in its simplicity: don’t.