Pablo Picasso once said “Computers are worthless. They can only give you answers.” - Even though he died in an age where the modern technology we have today was but a mere dream, I agree that sometimes there comes a point where you need to get away from the screen to stay creative.

Personally, I don’t work digitally – I tried it for a while last year because I felt I should. I felt like because a lot of others were working with collage that I would see if I could try my hand at digital collage and see if that would be ‘my style’ but it’s just not for me, I don’t enjoy having to rely too much on computers. I know it sounds ridiculous but I have bad-technology-luck; I accidentally delete things, lose work, and ruin work etc so I prefer to make things to have a hard copy, even if that does make it difficult sometimes to actually get onto screen. Due to this, I’ve had to utilise photography to get a digital copy of my work for posting on the internet and Etsy etc, and sometimes this can lose the effect of the textural quality.

I feel like the amount of work you will find on Etsy currently is evidence of a backlash to digital work; people have been ‘making’ more and more, creating handmade products that in my opinion have a lot of charm compared to some digital work I see. While on the one hand, digital work is always clean and polished and would therefore be preferable in an editorial piece or online where work can be zoomed in on to inspect the imperfections, I enjoy the delightful quality of something that is imperfect, something you can hold in your hands and feel the amount of effort that the maker has put into it. My personal preference is that of 3D objects and that’s something you can’t really get with digital illustrations.

However, I don’t in any way dismiss digital illustration, as much as I think there is too much of it out there and people can become jaded, there are always new ways to improve and rejuvenate any work such as adding textures to make things look real and textured. I don’t really like vectorised illustrations because they just seem flat and lifeless. In my portfolio visit with Mary Shears, she said how she likes when people can tell her products are handmade; there is a fine line between pieces looking shoddily made and handmade but she likes elements of imperfection that makes a customer able to see how it has been made, this is exactly how I feel. You have to make sure it looks professional enough that someone would be willing to actually pay for it but handmade enough that they know it is well made by you and that there is an element of yourself in the piece.

I feel this type of thing isn’t really possible with digital illustration and therefore I don’t like to work digitally, but I think the future of digital illustration is bright, with the introduction of more online newspapers, magazines, apps etc there is a lot more of a market for digital illustrators to design work for things such as these.