This is a picture of an illustration I got done yesterday. I had it hanging on my drawing board for almost 2 months, but yesterday I decided to force myself to finish it. It’s part of my book “When you get Yourself a Dinosaur” and is done as a paper collage with acrylics, markers and chalk. I will be taking good-quality photos of all my art soon, but for now this is the image that I’ve got.

This will probably be the last illustration that I actually do with “real” materials: I want to get a big graphic tablet (a “Wacom Cinitq 24HD Touch” to be exact) and start doing illustrations digitally. The reason is that real collages take too much time and effort to do on a commercial scale, even if you are making big images. By contrast, you can make digital images “look real”,  and this is much easier to work with: Faster, more flexible (you can make changes) and easy to distribute (printing, publishers, social media…).

So apart from occasional postcards or stuff like that, this is it. I will be putting my paper and the art supplies in storage. My room will be slighty less cluttered and I won’t need as much space for paper in the trash can. But learning to copy this look in Photoshop will be a challenge and there’s just something about holding the paper in your hand that I will miss. I’m not longing for the “good old days” or anything, I am grateful for the advancement in technology. I just appreciate the qualities of “real” materials. There is good and bad things about both working methods, I guess I’m just going from one good thing to the next. So good-bye “reality”, hello “digital world”.