Adobe’s survey of young artists finds inspiration in the old-fashioned tools

Guess what? Young creative people love old-time artistic tools. That’s what Adobe found when it researched the projects of creative folks ages 18 to 35 who post their work on Behance, its Creative Cloud portfolio site.

That conclusion, among others, was contained in data gathered for Adobe’s New Creatives Mashup research, part of a new series focusing on artists at the beginning of their careers.

“These new creatives are surging ahead in drawing and typography, creating more portraits and sketches, and – somewhat amazingly – using ink and pencil more frequently than older age groups,” wrote Will Allen, Adobe’s senior director of digital media in a blog post. 

“Given this sudden surge of analog-inspired work, along with the new creatives’ rapidly expanding interest in fields like freehand drawing, we can expect to see a wider adoption of this mindset and a continued shift to tactile-based creation, even in this new connected era,” Allen said.

Adobe derived data from the public projects of nearly 5 million creatives on Behance, which includes data on tags, project fields, project topic, engagement activity, location and more.

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Other findings were less surprising, such as the heavy influence of mobile platforms that allow people to work on the go. Nearly 1 million 18-22-year-olds who share their work on Behance are taking advantage of mobile platforms.

Adobe noted a 36 percent rise in mobile logins over the last year, and that this group is more than twice as likely to work on mobile platforms than the total population.

In terms of location, more interesting insights emerged. Beyond the urban areas like Brooklyn, Hamburg, London and San Francisco, Adobe’s research saw growth in Brazil, China, UK, India, Mexico, Russia and Canada.

Certain countries emerged as leaders in specific age segments such as Indonesia and Egypt with the youngest group of 18 to 22 year old artists, followed by France in the 23 to 28 year old sector and Germany in the 29 to 34 year old sector.

➤ Adobe Digital Index New Creatives Mashup