Ordinarily, I'm much more a fan of traditional art. I like getting in there and really working with the media, in a drawing sense even more than painting.
But sometimes, it's really great to have done something on computer.
The current story being a case in point. When I was in art school, David Macaulay spoke about the process of creating children's books. And what stuck with me the most was that the illustrator shouldn't draw the book from start to finish, because your facility with drawing the characters will improve as you go along. If you go from the beginning on, this change will be obvious to the reader. If you jump around so you've created the illustrations out of order, this isn't nearly as noticeable.
With my hand-drawn work, I've found this to be incredibly good advice.
Now to the computer part. I've definitely noticed that I'm doing this with the Woodcutter in this book. I've gotten into a way of drawing him that I really like. So when I went back to look at page one, I could see that the character was waaaay off. Features too small, head too round.
With traditional illustration, this would mean doing it all over again. On computer, I cut and pasted the head I liked, and now they all look consistent. Took all of five minutes. Glorious.
Here's a side-by-side comparison:
