Book Cover Illustrations

Magical Contact - digital painting by Duncan Long

There was a time when I drew my black and white artwork with pen and ink, working over pencil sketches that then were erased after the ink had dried. It was intensive, back-breaking work that often took all day just to produce two or three drawings.

And in my youth I played with oil paints and later acrylics.

But today I seldom draw and never paint except in the virtual digital sense, using digital tablet and computer. The main reason is that the process is just much faster and cleaner. Those pen-and-ink drawings that used to take half a day to complete not only look better when done digitally, they also can be done in a fraction of the time. Ditto with paintings.

The digital media allow for experimenting and then “undoing” if something doesn’t work. With paint, one could undo with a palette knife or another layer of paint, but there was no going back to what had been lost in the process of experimentation. There was no way to go back to what was working up to the point it quit working. Oil paints don’t come with an undo button.

And when it comes time to ship the picture to the publisher, it is a WHOLE lot easier. No packaging, no worry about weeks’ of work lost in the post, or falling victim to a drop, jab, or other disaster.

Of course as with all such things there are downsides. There is a joy in working directly with a physical medium that is lost, and I often miss this and regret that my time is so limited (in that ongoing scramble to make cash), that I have little time to experiment with those grand projects that might be created just for the self (and which can yield the unexpected and exotic).

But I suppose even those first cave painters likely complained about having to spend all their time out hunting mastodon when they could be back home painting by torchlight. Some things never change.

In the meantime, I will continue to create digitally. Like email that delivers messages much faster than the telegraph, painting digitally cuts down on time and expense, for me as well as my clients. With all due apologies to Marshall McLuhan, sometimes it’s the message, not the medium that counts.

Dragonfly - a digital drawing by Duncan Long

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When he’s not musing over the medium and the message, Duncan Long can generally be found at his digital tablet creating book illustrations and artwork that look as if drawn and painted with pen and brush, but which are actually digital from beginning to end. See more of his illustrations and artwork at Duncan’s Art Portfolio
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