I spent a week trying to digitize my sketchbook and it went exactly as expected

The messy transition from paper to screen

I really thought the process of digitizing my sketchbook would be straightforward. You draw something, you scan it, and then you just fix it up in Adobe Illustrator. But the reality is that nothing looks the same once it leaves the texture of cold-press paper. I spent way too much time staring at the screen at 300% zoom, trying to figure out why the colors looked so flat compared to the watercolor washes I had been working with. It is honestly exhausting. You spend hours on a single page, and then you have to deal with the inevitable noise that comes from a standard home scanner. It makes me miss the old days when I just did everything by hand and didn’t care about pixel perfection.

Wrestling with the pen tool

There is this specific annoyance with trying to force a hand-drawn look into a digital vector format. I spent about 45,000 KRW on a monthly subscription to the creative cloud, thinking it would make my workflow faster. Instead, I just found myself constantly clicking and dragging anchor points until my wrist hurt. I tried to use some of the automatic tracing features, but they always made the edges look like cheap clip art from the early 2000s. It felt like I was losing the soul of the drawing every time I cleaned up a stray line. Maybe I am just stubborn, but the software feels like it wants everything to be perfectly symmetrical, which is the exact opposite of what I wanted.

Learning curves in a quiet room

I sat in my room for about four hours every evening last week, trying to get the shading right on a digital illustration. The silence of the apartment was only broken by the occasional fan noise from my laptop. It is weird how digital work feels so solitary compared to sketching in a cafe. When you are out, you can see people, smell coffee, and have a sense of rhythm. At my desk, it is just me and the flickering cursor. I watched a few tutorials, but they all skip over the boring parts—like the time it takes to manage file layers or the frustration of a sudden crash. I still have not figured out the best way to back up my files properly, which gives me this low-level anxiety every time I save.

Comparing myself to the pros at the fairs

I went to the Seoul Illustration Fair at COEX recently, and seeing how people use digital printing tech—like the stuff from Brother Korea that prints directly onto fabric—made me realize how behind I am. Everything looked so crisp and professional. I felt a little bit of impostor syndrome just walking past the booths. People were selling stickers, tote bags, and even high-end prints that looked better than anything I have ever managed to pull off. It is easy to assume they have some secret shortcut that I just haven’t discovered yet, but then I remember that they probably just have a better handle on the software than I do. Or maybe they just have more patience for the tedious setup process.

Is it worth the digital headache

I am still not sure if I actually like the digital medium, or if I am just doing it because it seems like the standard for entry into any kind of contest or publication these days. Everything is centered around Adobe Illustrator now, and it is hard to stay relevant if you aren’t using these tools. Even when I look at the result, I sometimes feel like I could have just spent that time improving my hand-drawing skills instead of fighting with a screen. There is a lingering doubt in the back of my mind that I am sacrificing my own voice to become another generic user of the software. I might try to incorporate more manual textures next time, but for now, I have a folder full of half-finished projects that I am afraid to open again. Maybe I will look into some basic certification prep courses to get a better handle on the technical side, or maybe I will just go back to my sketchbook for a month to recover.