Hot take: I stopped using my drafting board altogether 2 years ago and it was the best move I made

I know a lot of old timers swear by the physical board for initial sketches, but I switched to full digital in 2021 after a messy ink spill ruined a whole day of work. I use a Wacom tablet now and honestly my linework is way cleaner (and way less smudged). My setup was a simple 24x36 board with a parallel bar, but I kept fighting with paper edges curling or tape gumming up. The real kicker was when a client asked for a revision and I had to erase and redraw something three times digitally in 10 minutes that would have taken an hour on paper. Has anyone else made the full jump away from traditional drafting and regretted it or am I in the minority here?

3 comments

3 Comments

sage_moore3715d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, the ink spill thing is real. I had a bottle of India ink tip over once and it went straight into my mechanical pencil sharpener, which I guess I thought would be fine to clean out but it just turned into this black sludge situation that gummed up the blades forever. That was the day I started really looking at going digital. I still kept my old board for like a year after that just in case I got the urge to do something physical, but eventually I realized it was just taking up space and collecting dust. The speed thing you mentioned with revisions is exactly why I don't miss it, clicking undo a few times beats trying to scrape off dried ink any day.

nguyen.morgan15d ago

@max223 cleaning that sharpener was brutal, @sage_moore37 I feel your pain on that one.

max22315d ago

Wait, did you say you actually tried cleaning the blades? I used to think going digital was like cheating or something but after hearing about that black sludge nightmare I'm starting to rethink my whole setup.