Pros and cons of digital drawing and pencil drawing (Sketching)

What are the pros and cons of digital drawing? What are the pros and cons for using a pencil and paper?

This post is mainly talking about just using a device and a digital pen for digital drawing.

This is my opinion and yours may be different.

Digital drawing

Pros

• Your erased work won’t leave a mark on the “paper”
• There is a huge variety of colours
• And pencil types
• You can trace art work (for practice) easily without having to print a picture
• Animating is usually done on digital and is much easier
• You can change the size of the eraser

Cons

• It cost more money for digital pens and a iPad
• For “newbies” shading is harder to figure out
• Tools can be hard to use or hard to figure out how to use correctly
• You can’t smudge the same way you would with a pencil
• There may be adds and you may have to pay to stop seeing them
• There will be things you may need that might cost money
• If you usually put your hand on the paper while using a pencil, you wont be able to do that here because then the “paper” will move
• Most digital pens only work for certain iPads if you are using one (In my experience I could find a iPad pen that would work and now the one I have is starting to stop working)

Pencil drawing (Sketching)

Pros

• You can smudge easier
• It doesn’t cost a lot of money
• In my experience colours blend better instead of just going on top of another colour.
• Shading is easier

Cons

• Erase marks may show.
• There aren’t as many colours to chose from
• Harder to share with lots of other people
• Eraser may be too big.
• You have to sharpen your pencil once in a while.

I prefer drawing with a pencil but you can choose what you want. It’s much easier but my digital pen is not the greatest. It’s also easier to go off a reference. Both choices are good in their own ways and if you are wary to try digital drawing, I would still suggest trying it.

I am sure there are more pros and cons for each I just didn’t think of them.

I hope this helped if you were having trouble decided between these two.