For at least forty years I have pretty much been  working non stop as an illustrator in and around Zürich. In the early days I used pen and paper, watercolour, gouache, airbrush, acrylics and magic markers. Work was not always technically intricate but usually challenging  because of deadlines, production and logistical problems. Back then there was no e-mail and work was usually approved by sending a courier with the artwork to the client. Was every job I did perfect? Probably not, but I did my very best to interpret the client's brief and add my own touch to deliver on time and on budget. In the beginning it was very difficult to change things, colours and shapes had to be seamlessly added or scratched away somehow from the original physical artwork. These days it all seems much simpler! Photoshop, 3D and even AI make it a breeze to change things, quite often hiding a lack of ideas or planning.
In the early 90's I jumped on the computer bandwagon. I was delivering a job to a printers and saw how they were moving and manipulating objects around in a photograph. This was on a computer the size and cost of a small car! I was blown away and wanted to find out how I could do the same thing myself. The first reality check was the cost of a desktop computer. The brand of choice for the illustrator/designer was the Macintosh or Mac. My first Mac was a Quadra 800 with 20MB hard disk and about 2MB internal ram! With a monitor and Wacom tablet, which was necessary to be able to draw freehand, I paid approximately 45,000 swiss francs!! That meant doing a lot of work to recoup my investment. These days an IMac with a thousand times more of everything, plus internet, costs maybe 2,000 swiss francs. It was tough being a pioneer!
Initially I used programs like Illustrator and Photoshop from Adobe, as well as a drawing app called Painter to replicate the prior hand drawn airbrush look. There were many teething problems with resolution, colour management and file sizes. Learning by doing was the only way and I think that's when I stopped reading books and started reading computer program manuals instead! There was no point in having all this expensive kit if I didn't know how to use it.