I’ve been drawing storyboards professionally since the late 1980’s, so, basically, a million years. I used to work full time/freelance at Ogilvy & Mather for a few years, then half a decade in the 1990’s as the primary Coca Cola illustrator at IMPACT, the promotional division of Foote, Cone & Belding. Now, throughout those eras, I worked traditionally with pencils, and markers on rag layout paper. Midway through my run at FCB, the powers that be provided me with a COM-PU-TER and a 

Wacom tablet. The thought here was to start incorporating digital stuff into the mix.

What followed for me—were two days of hell. You see, I’d never used a COM-PUT-TER or Wacom tablet and stylus before. And *then* I got a Photoshop retouching job for Coca Cola come in that day. Yeah. There was this ad where a big bottle of Coca Cola was bursting through the dry, cracked earth of the desert with chunks of earth flying around and they needed me to ad more chunks of earth flying around. *And they needed it in an hour.*

I never worked with Photoshop before that moment—remember: This was 1995. But, while sweating profusely, I managed to figure out what each item in the toolbox did, figured out cloning, the pen tool, the brush, etc. and finished in time. I was also lucky, the version of Photoshop I had was PS3—the first version with *layers*. (!) think about that. Anyway, that was a particularly harrowing hour on day one, amidst all the other work I had to do.

Day two, I was presented with the task of creating a t-shirt and baseball cap icon in about an hour—in Adobe Illustrator, another program I was totally unfamiliar with. And again, I figured out what needed to be done, figured out Bezier curves and survived the hour, meeting the deadline.

Really—being chucked into the deep end on both programs is not a bad way to assimilate knowledge quickly and comprehensively. I also thought I’d never get used to the Wacom tablet with the pen down on the tablet but the cursor on screen but I got used to that immediately.
Many folks we’re “raised” on the computer utilizing a mouse, but I started out with a stylus and Wacom tablet so that’s what I was a comfortable with. In those days, it was early going and while I was still drawing traditionally, I’d usually start scanning my stuff and then incorporating Photoshop effects into the illustrations, doing type in illustrator, etc. And so it went…….until 2002, where I’d already being working at EdseyArt for a few years and I actually stumbled upon a smooth and wonderful way to color digitally via the “multiply” setting for a layer in Photoshop.

Now, after many years of working with giant sets of hundreds of markers that were always in need of refilling, reorganizing. replacing nibs, buying marker fluid, being limited to a couple hundred colors……I jumped into coloring all my stuff digitally. Not a world of difference but a universe of difference. My color palette was now unlimited. Airbrushing was fast, clean and efficient. I did an ok job coloring with markers over the years, but if you made a mistake, the process to fix it was laborious and time consuming. As far as coloring goes, I’ve never looked back. I’d draw all my final frames in black Prisma-color or fine line marker, scan them and color them digitally, adding extra effects, etc.

The next step, of course, was to draw entirely digitally. But although I was usually the first guy to adopt any new equipment in the job, be it using a computer, coloring digitally, etc., *drawing* digitally, I felt, wasn’t the most efficient way to go —yet. Drawing on the Wacom tablet wasn’t as exact, and although you saved scanning time, it wasn’t comfortable enough for me to maintain quality and efficiency. So I waited, for the Cintiq.

One of the advantages of working with a studio with a lot of other free-lance illustrators is that you can at times, step back and let others test out equipment, then grill them for information and for this, I did just that. Eventually, I went over to my friend and fellow storyboard artist Mike Edsey’s house and did a little try out on his Cintiq HD24 to see if it did the job. The most important thing to me is that there was no lag time between drawing the line on screen and it actually appearing on screen. The Cintiq performed wonderfully.

So having taken the machine through my own beta testing I got one and it is a dream. Now, the one thing you do lose going fully digital is the pencil shading, that natural grain that effects the paper. BUT, with Photoshop, there are ways around even that. Over the years, I have learned that basically, there is nothing I can’t do, factoring in all the tools at my disposal.

There will always be old school detractors of the digital ways and that’s understandable. Traditional pencil sketches, colored pencils, marker renderings, painting, none of that will ever go away but when you’re dealing with Storyboards in Advertising, you have to tackle the job with efficiency and above all, quality, and do your best. Actually, in general, considering we’re saving on scanning time and corrections/changes are easier, you *CAN* say, I believe, that the digital process is 20 to 25% faster across the board.

And a final note on Traditional vs Digital: delivering jobs via email these days allows us to service the entire world, as opposed to having to deliver jobs on foot locally, so digital has indeed given us A LOT.

- Rick Lundeen is a storyboard artist represented by EdseyArt for over 17 years.  Rick is also an accomplished comic book illustrator.  To see his comic art visit http://www.epochkblamm.net/