Digital art is becoming more and more popular. There is a huge market and an increasing number of artists are getting interested in making digital art. You too? If so, what are the benefits of learning digital art? In this post, I’m going to give 12 good reasons why learning digital art is useful – and where you can learn it!
Digital art has become an essential part of contemporary art and nobody can deny the importance of digital art in our lives anymore. As technology advances, more and more types of digital start to emerge.
Likewise, more and more artists start to create art with the help of computers – whether they are new artists or coming from traditional media.
What makes digital art so interesting? Well, there are quite a few benefits of being a digital arts student. The first and most significant advantage of digital art is its convenience. It is easy to access, easy to share and publish, easy to print, and easy to carry around.
Learning digital art is also useful for beginners: as opposed to traditional art, digital art is more forgiving and makes correcting mistakes easy.
The convenient replicability and lenience with mistakes prompted critics to say that digital art is not as valuable as traditional art. These arguments were used as 2 disadvantages of digital art. However, the digital vs. traditional art debate has long been settled.
Now you might wonder whether there is actually a market for digital art.
Don’t worry. Digital art is one of the most popular contemporary methods of art and collectors are willing to pay a lot of money for digital artwork. Recently, a piece of digital art sold for 69 million dollars.
As you can see, there are a lot of advantages of using digital artwork and in this post we are going to talk about 12 benefits of learning digital art.
What is digital art?
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the benefits of learning digital art, let’s see what it actually is.
According to Wikipedia, “digital art is an artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process.”
Digital art is also known as ‘computer art’ and ‘multimedia art’. On a larger scale, it’s part of the field of ‘new media art’.
Since the 1960s, digital technology has an impact on all artistic endeavors, including painting, literature, drawing, sculpture and music.
Nowadays, digital art is also considered a fine art and contemporary art that uses the methods of mass production or digital media.
Is learning digital art useful?
A significant advantage of using digital artwork is that is can be easily shared. Once a digital artist has created a piece, it can be almost instantaneously viewed and admired by people from all over the world.
At the same time, there is a huge market for digital art – not only for selling digital artwork but also regarding the job market for artists.
There’s a multitude of jobs available and studies found that the majority of artist jobs are medium-paid jobs with a salary of more than $60k per year. There are also some high-paid jobs with an annual salary of over $65k and $100k. Wow, not bad…
That means learning digital art is not only useful if you want to express yourself creatively, but also if you are looking for a well-paid and interesting digital art job!
What are the benefits of learning digital art?
Sounds good? Then let’s see what other benefits you can expect from learning digital art!
Here is a round-up of 12 advantages that come with digital art:
12 Benefits of Learning Digital Art
1. Digital art saves money.
This may sound a bit strange, but generally speaking, digital art is cheaper than traditional art in the long run.
What do you need for digital art? A computer – you probably already have one. If not, a laptop or tablet is fine. Digital art software – there are even completely free editing apps. And last but not least, a drawing tablet – as a serious digital artist you don’t want to work with your mouse and trackpad. Once you got these, there are no more recurring costs to pay.
Related: Ultimate Guide To The Best Wacom Drawing Tablet For Beginners
Traditional art, on the other hand, fully relies on consumable items that you will need to replace on a regular basis. You will need to buy pencils, paintbrushes, paper, canvases, paints, easels, palettes and more over and over again.
Over time, this can get pretty expensive and exceed the costs of digital art equipment by far!
2. Digital art saves space.
Traditional artists usually need a studio or extra room to work in. They need a place that can store all the art tools, canvases, and finished drawings and paintings. Depending on the size of the paintings, the space required might be pretty huge.
To make digital art, you only need a desk where you can place you computer and drawing tablet (some display tablets even allow you to work in your lap).
That means you can even be in the tiniest room and still produce digital creations!
Likewise, you don’t need any physical space to store your creations. All your virtual files can sit safely on your hard drive or in your cloud storage!
3. Digital art doesn’t require any cleaning.
That’s some great news! As a digital artist, you don’t need to clean and tidy up your workplace.
Once you are done creating art for the day, all you need to do is save your file, put away your drawing tablet, and shut down your computer.
There are no stains on the floor or on your clothes that you need to remove.
When you are done with a traditional painting, for example, you need to tidy up your studio.
That means cleaning the brushes, wiping off excess paint, and maybe changing your clothes.
4. Digital art preparations are less time-consuming.
This is just like with the cleaning. While you need time to clean up everything once you are done with traditional art, it is also pretty time-consuming to make the preparations.
You will need to get all the tools ready, including your canvas or paper, your brushes, pencils, water, cleaning tissues, and so on.
Digital art preparations are comparably fast. Just switch on your computer, open the file, and grab your drawing tablet. That’s all you need to start editing!
5. Digital art is fast.
Apart from requiring very little time for preparing and cleaning up, digital art is faster in general.
If you have ever created a traditional oil painting, you know how long it can take to dry. Depending on the layers you applied, the drying process can take several days or even weeks.
Digital pixels, on the other hand, don’t need any time to dry. Once you’ve placed your pixels on the canvas, there’s nothing more to wait for!
6. Digital art is immediately ready for Printing and Publishing
Another benefit of learning digital art is that it is immediately ready for printing and publishing.
Once you finish a piece of digital artwork, all you need to do is save it in the correct file format and then you can upload it straight to social media and art sharing websites. You can be sure that your digital artwork will always look as good as on your computer.
The same is true if you want to print digital art. Once you’ve saved your creation in an appropriate file format, it is ready to be sent to the printer.
If you don’t have the equipment to print and ship your digital art yourself, then you can use a drop-shipping company.
Drop-shipping is an easy and convenient way to deliver art prints to your customers. When a customer buys a print of your digital art, the order goes to the drop-shipper who then handles everything for you – from printing, to packaging, to shipping. You as the artist don’t need to do anything!
Here are some drop-shipping companies that specialize in high-quality art prints:
- Printful: This is a popular drop-shipping company for fine art prints. They also fulfill international orders and you can easily link them to ecommerce platforms such as Etsy and Shopify or your own artist website.
- Printify: Another popular drop-shipper for art prints of all kinds. Their pricing is very competitive, but they are not optimized for international shipping.
- Finerworks: This company specializes in fine art and canvas prints. They are great for giclée printing and also offer other print-on-demand products. You can easily link them with your art store.
Related: How To Make A Website For Digital Art – Best Website Builder For Artists
7. Digital art is more forgiving than traditional art.
Digital art is more forgiving of mistakes than traditional art. If you make a mistake in your editing program, all you need to do is press CMD + Z to undo it or go back in the history.
If you do something wrong on a traditional artwork and later on want to correct it, it’s way harder. On an oil painting, you can overpaint it, but if you’ve created something with wood or on paper, it’s nearly impossible to undo.
Moreover, it’s also easy to modify a digital artwork whenever you wish. Digital files are usually made up of layers, layer masks, adjustment layers, effects, filters, and so on. All these elements can be changed any time at the click of a button!
8. Digital art is quickly reproducible.
Now you might wonder why easy replicability is a benefit of learning digital art.
Initially, purists used to argue that digital art is less valuable than traditional art because it’s so easy to reproduce. However, this may also be seen as a benefit of digital art because it speeds up the creative process and ensures that your digital creation always looks like ‘the original’.
Once you’ve created an element digitally, it’s easy to use it over and over again. As long as it inspires you, you can simply paste the same element into another creation and express a new idea.
Related: How Do You Caption An Artwork? – 101 Creative Quotes On Art To Pep Your Posts
If you wish to recreate the same element in traditional art, you will need to paint or draw it all over again every time you want to use it. And even then it won’t turn out exactly the same but slightly different.
With digital art, you don’t have that problem. You can recreate the original the same way as many times as you like. This can also be a benefit for your customers: every customer has the chance to get a copy of your art exactly the way they saw it on their screen.
9. Digital art offers endless possibilities to explore.
Traditional art offers all kinds of mediums and materials you can experiment with to create a finished physical product. These are surely a lot of creative possibilities to explore.
But I believe that digital art provides at least an equal amount of new things to discover – if not more.
Digital art software offers so many different functions and features that you can always try out something new.
Photoshop (best all-round software), Corel Painter (best for digital painting), Clip Studio Paint (great for manga and anime art) are all super-performing programs. Even if you learned one new thing every day, you probably wouldn’t exhaust the possibilities during your lifetime.
Plus, there are always new and advanced features being added to the program. This array of functionality probably even surpasses the possibilities of traditional art…
10. Digital art is becoming more and more popular.
Computer technology has been with us for more than 25 years, and for almost as much time, we have digital art.
In fact, computers have revolutionized art in all fields – from photography, graphic design, photo editing, and film. In short, the entire domain of visual arts has changed with the rise of technology.
Ever since, more and more artists start to explore the realm of digital art – whether they are new artists or coming from traditional art.
At the same time, digital art enjoys an increasing number of collectors and fans all over the world and there’s a huge market for digital artwork.
As it’s very unlikely that digital art is going to disappear any time soon, it’s well worth checking out the technological means of creating art and it’s also a good opportunity to start your own digital art business!
11. Digital art is easy to store and hard to lose.
Digital art is simply data. All digital artwork is stored in form of files on your local computer or online cloud storage.
That makes it easy to store your digital art and to bring along your artwork wherever you go.
Physical pieces are obviously more cumbersome. They are also at a higher risk to break or get damaged, especially when you transport them.
Even though your computer might crash or your hard disk might get corrupted, it’s comparably harder to lose a digital artwork. Of course, you should always make sure to have a backup of your hard work – just like of all your other data!
12. Digital art is easy for beginners, too.
One of the huge benefits of learning digital art is that it’s easy for beginners, too. The tools you need for digital art are pretty accessible. Almost everyone already has a laptop or tablet at home. If you don’t want to spend any money, you can start with a free editing program and your mouse or trackpad.
When you see that you like the craft and want to stick with it, you can get a drawing tablet. There are some well affordable options around. I recommend the Wacom Intuos or the One by Wacom as great entry-level tablets.
There’s also the Wacom One for all those who want to work directly on a screen. However, it’s a bit more expensive than screenless tablets.
To actually teach yourself digital art, you can start with easy editing tasks. For example, you can put together two or three photos, if you would like to get into photo manipulation and image compositing.
If you prefer digital painting, getting started is as easy. You can begin by tracing a photo or an illustration to learn the technique. To do so, you simply create a new layer over the original image and then you copy the lines of the subject. This is very helpful to learn the basics – just be careful of the copyrights!
Related: Is It OK Learning From Copying Art?
Where to learn digital art?
Now that we’ve looked at what are the benefits of learning digital art, it’s time to see where you can actually learn it!
The best way to learn digital art is by taking an online course. These days, you can start learning any software program for free. There are lots of tutorials around, on YouTube and other websites. If you are interested in Photoshop, you can check out the free tutorials on this website.
This is surely great for a start, but if you want to get serious about learning digital art, I highly recommend following a professional course. Why? Because it is important to have a good structure to follow and start building your skills by learning the fundamentals step-by-step.
If you jump straight in and try to learn the advanced features before understanding the basics, things can get messy quickly.
If you take one step after the other, you’ll get a solid grasp of the basics and achieve the fastest results!
Photoshop Online Courses
Photoshop has been around for more than 30 years now and has remained the industry-leader in digital art software. Why Photoshop? Because it’s the most versatile all-round editing app that offers great functionality and user-friendliness.
Still, Photoshop is pretty easy to learn and even some basic skills are enough to take your photos to the next level!
The latest Photoshop version is available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service. You can sign up for a Free 7-Day Trial of Photoshop here, before committing to any of their subscription plans.
If you like Photoshop and want to get it permanently, there are three plans to choose from.
The cheapest is the Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom and costs only $9.99 a month. The other two options are the Single App Plan for $22.99 a month and the All Apps Plan for $59.99 per month, if you’d like to use all Adobe products.
If you are a student or teacher, there’s a 60% discount awaiting you that you can redeem here.
Overall best Photoshop training course for beginners led by an Adobe-certified instructor.
This Photoshop course is ideal for total beginners and artists with a bit of previous editing knowledge. Adobe-certified trainer Daniel Scott teaches you all the basic Photoshop skills – one by one. The lessons are well structured and there are lots of exercises and assignments for you to practice.
Even when you already have some experience, this course is highly recommended. More than 8 hours of training will get you familiar with all the fundamentals you need to know to start editing.
Overall, this is one of the best online Photoshop courses for everyone wanting to get started with digital art!
Excellent online course for all digital artists with previous knowledge who want to dive deeper into Adobe Photoshop.
The Adobe CC Advanced Training is the follow-up course to the Essential Training.
The course is also taught by Adobe expert Daniel Scott, so you can be sure to get the same top quality!
Apart from advanced editing skills, you will learn 3D animation and post-production techniques.
The course is equally useful, regardless of whether you want to work in digital art, graphic design, film, or cartoons.
As usual, you can follow the course at your own pace.
Corel Painter Online Courses
Corel Painter focuses specifically on digital painting and drawing. Many artists use it for illustration, manga, anime, photo and concept art.
Corel Painter is professional digital art software that comes with lots of brushes that emulate all types of natural media.
With a purchase price of $350, Corel Painter is not exactly cheap, but there are no recurring subscription fees. With a one-time payment, you acquire the usage rights to the software for a lifetime. Updates come at a discounted price, and you will often find the software on sale at a considerable discount.
To see if Corel Painter is right for you, you can start a Free 30-Day Trial here.
A great course for all digital art beginners to get confident in using Corel Painter quickly.
This Corel Painter Course on Udemy teaches you the basics of the digital painting app.
The course is led by long-time illustrator and fine artist Jason Maranto from VTC Software Training who will make you familiar with the core features of Corel.
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to use Corel Painter confidently and have an in-depth grasp of all its main tools and functions.
The course consists of altogether 86 individual lectures with a total duration of 8 hours. The lessons are easy to follow and packed with lots of useful tips and tricks!
The benefits of learning digital art include the option to easily transform your photos into oil paintings with Corel Painter.
This Corel Painter course by Ania Krzymowska specifically focuses on editing photos into painting-like artworks. The course is great for beginners but also for experienced photographers who want to enhance their skillset.
You will learn all the technical and practical steps to make your images look like oil paintings. In particular, you’ll learn how to use brushes, layers and opacity, edit clothes and skin, refine eyes, dodge and burn, clone from different images, and much more.
Moreover, you can download the custom digital brush pack that the instructor uses for the painterly edits in this course.
This Corel Painter course is still kind of an insider tip, but the students who already tried it out gave it excellent reviews on Skillshare!
Clip Studio Paint Online Courses
Clip Studio Paint is a popular drawing app for manga and comic artists. It’s available in two versions: the PRO (standard) version and the fully featured EX (expert) version.
The EX version allows you to save comic and manga pages in a ‘book’, meaning one huge editable file. You can then print everything out in bulk, which is incredibly time-saving if you’re a professional comic book creator.
However, the EX version is substantially more pricey than the PRO version, and if you’re not planning on printing out your art on a professional level, you most likely won’t need the additional features.
You can try either version with a Free 30-Day Trial of both Clip Studio PRO and EX here.
The ideal pick for all digital artists wanting to get to grips with animation in Clip Studio Paint.
This Clip Studio Paint course is for all artists starting out – no previous experience required! All you need is a copy of Clip Studio Paint (get your Free 30-Day Trial here) – and, if possible, a drawing tablet. A simple entry-level tablet, like the One by Wacom or a Wacom Intuos, is totally enough.
In this course, digital animator expert Kim Williams will teach you the basics of animation. To begin with, you will learn how to set up your workspace and create an animation file.
Then it goes on with how to use digital illustration techniques and draw frames. By the end of the course, you’ll be familiar with detailed character animation and able to create your very own characters and export them in both Clip Studio Paint Pro & EX.
So if you want to get started with manga or comic book art, this is the right course for you!
Great course for beginners and intermediate users to get a broad understanding of all the possibilities of Clip Studio Paint.
This Udemy course covers both Clip Studio Paint Pro and Ex, formerly called Manga Studio 5. One of the great benefits of learning digital art is that it is so versatile.
Brian Jackson takes this into account and teaches you the fundamentals of a broad array of digital art techniques. These include graphic art, 2D animation, painting, drawing, and comic book art.
By the end of the course, you will be familiar with the essential tools and techniques in digital drawing and painting and the use of 3D reference models.
Udemy also offers you the possibility to download a certificate of completion once you’ve finished the course.
This course is one of the most popular online courses for learning Clip Studio Paint Pro/Ex. More than 8,000 students are enrolled so far and have given the course excellent reviews.
With almost 18 hours of teaching, you can be sure to have a good command of CSP once you are done with all the lessons!
Hey, my artsy friends! I hope this post convinced you of the benefits of learning digital art and that you found the resources where to learn it useful. In any case, I wish you lots of fun and success being creative! xoxo Angie
Great wordpress blog here.. It’s hard to find quality writing like yours these days. I really appreciate people like you! Take care
Hi Raul, happy to hear that you like my art blog. Good to have you here ♥︎