Why ink? Why not digital?
This is probably one of the most contentious questions we get, as many of our students aspire to become digital artists. That's a goal I can certainly relate to - I myself have done all of my professional work digitally, and I even spent about ten years using digital tools to learn (between ages 13 to 23). I love working digitally.
Here's the thing - digital tools, and computers in general, exist for a singular goal: to make you faster and more efficient. Whether it's to write essays for school, pay your taxes, calculating the six hundredth decimal of pi, or creating an illustration, digital tools will allow you to complete your task more quickly. In the context of producing work for a client or employer, this translates to more money. The less time we spend, the more work we can get done, and thus the more value we can offer and the more we can be paid in return.
For that very same reason, I have found both in my own experience and in teaching other students, that digital tools have the opposite effect when we're learning. Learning is not about being fast. Learning is about taking our time, and both analyzing and understanding the motivation and reasoning behind the actions we take. It demands that time be invested, and while there are certainly things we can do to spend that time more effectively, tools that are designed to make you go faster will, by that same design, be more likely to cause you to rush, and to spend that time far less effectively.
Of course it's possible to learn using digital tools, but it's more of an uphill climb. While you may make a point of forcing yourself to take your time, there will always be those moments where you lose focus and slip back into following the nature of the tool.
Ink on the other hand - specifically the fineliner pens we use here - has a number of very useful qualities:
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It makes it much harder to draw loosely and thoughtlessly. Every action you take is plainly visible with a dark stroke on the page. This forces us to slow down and consider what we're doing before putting those marks down. We can certainly still rush, but it very quickly becomes an unsustainable approach, forcing students to correct that behaviour.
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It skips over a lot of the little hiccups we can run into when dealing with electronic hardware and software. A tablet needs to translate the physical action you're performing when drawing into signals that then tell the software what to display. There are countless things that can get in the way and cause both the hardware and software to behave incorrectly - bugs, driver conflicts, the specifications of your computer, and so on. All of this can be overcome, but it can be very frustrating for a beginner to navigate.
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Depending on the tool you use, you may have different ways in which you can vary the marks you make. Some tools vary in different ways - drawing more heavily or lightly to make darker or fainter marks on the page, changing the angle of the stroke to create broader or narrower marks, and so on. The pens we employ here - which I'll expand upon a little further down the page - really only vary in one way: the thickness of the stroke. Applying less or more pressure will create a thinner or thicker stroke, while that stroke will continue to remain rich and dark (assuming it's not running dry, anyway). This helps us train our pressure control more naturally, which itself is a very useful skill to learn if you plan on working digitally later on.
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