Value Neutral Technology Question

Completely uncontroversial question about technology, especially for any graphics designers, artists out there. How do most professional artists work with technology? My son has the makings of being a great artist, but his main medium is simple pencil, pen, and paper. He does fantastic stuff. And I imagine a lot of artists love the non-technology approach. But how does an artist get their pencil and paper stuff into a computer, like what’s the standard process nowadays? I know there’s scanning, but that seems too inexact, like you can scan something in but it’d be useless to then edit in a graphics program. Or do artists use some kind of stylus/tablet to start with? I’m talking serious artists now who do real art, not the silly stuff you see kids doing in TV commercials for Apple ipads. :slight_smile:
Thoughts?

If you want to create art on a computer a stylus is the way to go. If you want to import art into a page layout program and do simple crops and resizing then scanning is fine. However, fine art collectors want original hand-drawn works, not works created on a computer. This may change in the near future as the rich old farts die off and their progeny take over the world.

There are obviously many tools available to create your art on a computer, but if you want to convert a drawing from a paper to a vector, you basically have to start all over: scan your original and then trace it. I use Illustrator and a mouse, but there is a number of programs to choose from. Depends what you’re after.