Why even consider simulating real paints digitally?


Which was done with real paint and which was drawn digitally? That's a question I often quized my daughter when she was growing up. We'd be looking for picturebooks in the library and I always favoured picturebooks drawn with real paint. Asking myself why, I'd explain it this way:

  1. Real paints feel more warm and organic. Like a real person really got their hands into it.
  2. With real paints I feel that the painter took more thought and skill to craft it a certain way. As in, it took more effort to fix a mistake or just go with the mistakes and made it work.With digital, it's easy to undo and hide mistakes as if they never happened. 
  3. The lines textures feel more natural and rich. Digital paint and textures can also feel rich especially when scanned from real paint, but I find they often lack spontaneity, too orderly, too controlled. (Btw, the top picture is with real paints)
  4. When drawing comics with a half-natural-line-and-half-digital-colouring approach (which I often do), I think it looks OK because comics are read quickly and, as I reader, I just want to know what happens and get a sense of the feeling from the art. But for picturebooks, the pictures are bigger and I want to slow down and take it all in. I want to savour the art. I want to feel the lines and paint and textures. I want to live in the page for awhile. And with digital, it feels like it is a artificially constructed space and not real. While with real paint, it feels like a space the story teller really lived and worked in. It "feels more real" as many people put it.  
So if I'm illustrating a picturebook, My first choice would be to do it with real paints. I have tried many ways to get away with it over the years (when I was less confidence with natural media). I've also done 1 or 2 picture books entirely simulating paints digitally. They look alright on their own but compared to my other work with real paints, real paints still win. Real paints was often messier and I had to do it at my desk instead of my sofa, but I did find it more fun and enjoyable, like I was playing rather than working.

So why did I do a Youtube video about simulating natural media digitally? I note that some of you were asking "Why even consider it?"

Imagine you are a student at an art school, and your parents only provided you with an iPad or laptop. You have a budget of $5 for lunch every day. You don't own a scanner, or a printer. It costs money to go to a shop to scan stuff. OK, you do have a smart phone camera with camscanner app. But that's not great for scanning paintings. You might have some basic paints and brushes from a painting class in the past. You are rusty. You do have more experience drawing your favourite manga and anime characters on Procreate or ClipStudio. Now you are given a picturebook assignment due in a few weeks. It is your first time putting a story and layout together. You are struggling with it and doing tweaks suggested by the teacher. You might have 2 weeks left to paint the pages because you procrastinated. How would you choose to render the pages- with real paints or your iPad?

I find that most students would choose digital paints over real paints even though (I feel) the results won't be as amazing as real paints.

But the next problem is that even when drawn and painted digitally, the art might look like a poor simulation of real paint. It's not convincing at all. And it might be that many young ones today have very limited or zero experience with real paint. So when they try to simulate real paint digitally the process is all wrong! They might find a brush that says acrylic and apply it like watercolour and think that is how acrylic should look. Or they will use too many layers and it doesn't allow the paint to mix.

So that's why the video below. I realise that if anyone were to try make their digital paintings look like real paints, it's best to know the process required of that paint medium. And it will get it looking closer to the real thing. And then I hope they'd brush up their skills with the real thing, in time! Yes it will be messier, it will take more work, but it will be worth it.

Some tips: Gouache is different from acrylic. Acrylic would need an underpainting and the layers above while gouache is applied thick without underpainting. At least, that's what I've learned using real paints

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