I first started using Photoshop in 1994 when I was at university. I have also used GIMP which is like an older version of Photoshop if you were to compare the two. If you looked at my digital paintings you could maybe wonder if I only started using  Photoshop yesterday. One of the reasons I don’t polish my digital images is I want them to look naïve without pretending to look naïve. I was actually thinking of either getting an iPad with Apple Pencil or a Wacom drawing screen but even then I wouldn’t necessarily polish the images up. Part of my reasoning is philosophical. That is I don’t want to create finished digital paintings. I want them to be guides for work on walls at the least. Yet not strict guides. I want to still move the work on a wall to wherever it needs to go on the day. You can make finished work with Photoshop if you want to. Yet I don’t want my digital work to look like my work on walls. I have come close with one work where the digital work and the work on a wall is similar. It still works but it isn’t a goal. The main question is, why bother? If it doesn’t look good then what is the point? The main point is to limit my tools. Rather than building a structure with selection tools or paths, I want to just use the brushes and that is it. One interesting thing I have learned from this approach is you can never have too many lines. The more lines intersecting within the work the more it becomes a complex form. When I was first started experimenting with some of these line-based works I limited the number of lines I did which would also create depth using colour. After doing digital-based work I found the lines were more important than I initially realised. I still feel that drawing on paper is a better use of time. What I used to do in the early 2000s was scan my drawings into Photoshop and work the image up from there. Or scan the drawing in sections and use layers so I could work on each layer. These days though I don’t want to even bother. Not because I am lazy or reckless but because I want my work to be solely physical, either as a document of that physical piece or a piece of paper with a drawing on it. In saying that though I would still be happy to print some of my digital work on a small scale. I am quite happy with some of them. Maybe I could print some digital work as Christmas gifts?