Re-wilding My Digital Art Process

On becoming less dependent on digital tools and returning to a more human, joyful process.

I am constantly thinking about my illustration style. I’m obsessed these days with returning to a more analogue-based process. This latest obsession began over a year ago when I was encountering serious style fatigue — the pervasive, overwhelming loss of interest in my own illustration style as it had become at that point. At first, it was a sort of background ennui that I mostly ignored, knowing how hard I’d worked over the years for a consistent, recognizable style — which I was familiar with enough that it would be relatively easy to get into any illustration project without too much initial “figuring out” of what direction I would take. But this background ennui grew into an almost depressive state that was impossible to ignore. In a moment of clarity, I realized what the root problem was: it wasn’t so much that I hated my style as much as I grew bored with the process.

To keep this story short, I’ll just say that there was a time, in my beginning stages as an illustrator, when the process was very analogue-based, and I used Photoshop only to compose the finished illustration — all based on sketches and elements I created in the real, messy world. Then, as I got busier as an illustrator, I leaned more into…