The Start of a Digital Analog Era

What does it mean? I honestly don’t know (since it’s not an official term), but according to my artistic calendar, I am ready for it.

Oct 16, 2024

I think people often underestimate what an artist truly does. The common perception? Give us a piece of paper and we’ll draw. Done.

But artists are far more complex than that. They’re also innovators, researchers, inventors, and above all, never-ending experimenters. It’s thanks to artists in the past with their inquisitive minds that technology progresses as it does today.

Take Leonardo Da Vinci, for example. He was the first artist who seriously devoted his time to study flight — to the point of obsession. Without his hundreds of concept sketches of flying machines, would humans have ever dreamed of soaring through the skies? And inspired engineers to make his drawings into reality?

I’d say in modern terms you’d call him a trendsetter. Except no one took the bait to take it further. Sad, they missed an early start on steampunk era.

People only saw his ideas as impractical and impossible to build. The biggest obstacle to experimentation is opposition.

And oppositions can be many things, not just human disbelief.

That, my friends, is why many people don’t bother pursuing things outside the norm. It’s a risk, a gamble, likely to end up as a waste of time.

It wasn’t until over 400 years later that Leonardo’s work inspired the Wright Brothers. From there, we know the gist of history, right? Spoiler: Airplanes exist.

Why were Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines not successful in his time?

A) Leonardo didn’t believe in his own designs and never pursued them.
B) His designs were stolen by rival inventors.
C) He lacked the materials and technology needed to build them.
D) The people in his time wouldn’t let him test it.

The point of the story above is this: It’s okay to be curious and have a wide range of interest, even as an artist! Our famous Leo was known to be a perfectionist, but that didn’t stop him from being distracted to new ideas and subjects that fueled his creativity.

He was always experimenting with what he learned, making ingenious new tools, and applying those discoveries to many of his now famous paintings and sketches.

Maybe it’s part of our creative instinct to dabble in all kinds of mixed media. Or perhaps it’s simply human’s insatiable thirst for knowledge…

It all begins with the small things. As a kid, you beg your parents for markers, pastels, and sketchbooks. Friends surprise you with watercolor paints, Micron pens, and those fancy Moleskine notebooks on your birthday.

Later, it involves monetary sacrifices on your part, which can be achieved through hard work and putting in the extra hours. That’s how I saved up for my iPad Pro…

Other times, you negotiate (or humbly plead) for a collaborative promise, also known as seizing or creating an opportunity, and relying on luck. That’s how I acquired drawing tablets like Wacom (from an art contest) and reviewing for XP-Pen.

All of these materials required intensive research and practice, which fed my enthusiasm to keep drawing. I jumped from traditional to digital mediums, swapped digital pens for ink pens — and back again, because let’s face it, there’s no one way to create art.

So, I thought I’d tried it all.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I happened to come across a rather obscure community, a hidden corner of the art world that’s slowly attracting some creative audience. Back then, I overlooked it, much like the people in Leonardo’s time who dismissed his flying machines. I felt that this, too, was impractical and still in its early stages.

But I kept my eyes on it.

Waiting… to see if something better would emerge.

And it seems like it finally has.