Digital Line Versus Drawn Line

Digital art is hard. I've been experimenting with it on an outstanding comic project that I'm working on and it isn't easy to approach. Maybe my tablet is too small, or I simply haven't committed to making it work, but there is something about creating a digital file that just doesn't excite me for this project in particular.

But I wonder exactly what I need to do to make it work. And wonder exactly what it is that I have issue with. And I've decided that when I try to start an image that is purely digital, I get lost in the abstractedness of the method of input. When I have a 11x17 piece of paper with a 10x15 working space, and I set pencil to paper, overlap it with ink and then scan it into a digital file--I still have a physical understanding of the images I've created. I think I take for granted the mark I leave on what I create.

Drawings are nothing but the evidence of action--my pencil touches paper in a specific pattern and all facilities accounted for, I am left with a physical memory of of where my hand was and how it moved at a specific time in a specific place. This isn't all there is to drawing, but it is a base element.

When I touch a stylus to a drawing tablet that is connected to my computer, the process is altered. The lines I make on the screen, though analogue to the movements I've made, are only digital interpretations of a movement that once existed. They are physically different to a line on a piece of paper, and indeed, exist as without physical form. Sure, when I draw a line on a tablet, a line shows up on my screen, but that line is only suggestive of physicality--it exists as data to give the illusion that a physical action once occurred and when all is said, is hollow in content.

A digital line, no matter how suggestive, fluid, or varied, can still be broken down into a series of ones and zeros. Ons and offs. yeses and nos. But a drawn line isn't so easily analyzed. Yes, the line still may exist in a similar fashion to it's digital counterpart, but no matter how far it is analyzed, it can never be defined by a simple binary. The weight of the line, the hand of the artist, the rapid dulling of the tool, the slight powdering of the graphite, the slight burr of the paper and the pencil cuts into it; all these elements cannot be replicated by current programming prowess. And maybe it is these imperfections that I crave when I compose images purely digitally. It isn't as though digital art has no place--quite the opposite--but no matter how far we come, the gap only continues to widen between a line on a computer screen and a line on a piece of paper.