All in all, the distinction between hand-drawn and computerised art is thinning. Often these two mediums overlap and resemble each other as increasingly more pressure and tilt sensitive drawing tablets are being developed to overcome that difference even further. It is interesting to look back on the 1950s, when modern art movements strived to abandon the hand-made qualities altogether: brushstroke was lost in hard-edge painting whereas Hyperrealism excelled in photographic precision. Whereas now, digital graphics have turned back to imitate traditional art: attempting to recreate the unpredictable, sloppy and uneven hand-drawn qualities, in order to achieve visuals that feel more organic and natural than the computerised lines.

However different, digital media is not the end point but an extension of drawing. While the physical artwork exists in one form only, digital media can keep on exploring, with unlimited variations and choices available. Still, many digital artists, myself included, prefer to begin their work with hand-drawn sketches, before transferring them onto digital media, in order to have a solid, natural basis for their work. Programmes can imitate aesthetic choices by calibrated patterns, but without a human consciousness, cannot produce a work of art as such. It is an artist’s decision that makes a drawing, either through method, tools or choice of composition. There will always be an active “push and pull” between the new and the old, choice and chance, study and intuition, a strive away from and again back to our subjective human perception.