I think when I tried to go fully digital I was a worse artist. And definitely much slower. I don’t think my experience is universal or anything but for me I thought I HAD to work digitally if I wanted to make a living and it was a huge slog for me. I was not enjoying myself and everything took me a million hours.
I didn’t start actually earning a living until I made the switch back to traditional. It took a good while but being forced to make mistakes you eventually just learn to stop making them. (Also I feel like a lot of my favorite drawings came out of messing something up with ink and being forced to make it work).
A page of comics that would take me over a week digitally now takes me a few hours traditionally and I find that the skills also translate to when I do occasionally work digitally (but the ability to undo does slow me down noticeably). I am also a victim of zooming in too much.
Most people only spend a few seconds looking at a panel. I feel like zooming in and drawing every little thing you can takes away from learning the ability to draw impressions of things which is a pretty valuable skill in cartooning. I don’t think that’s a lesson you can ONLY learn traditionally at all but it certainly helped me a lot.
