So…. essentially for my entire artistic career I have been a strictly analogue kind of person. Paper, ink, paint, pen, brush - those utilities have been squarely where my comfort zone is. Right around the time I was finishing up art school was when the digital medium was really starting to take off so it was easy to kind of brush it off as a fad and not really take the time to recognize that it was in fact, here to stay. Ive always been a traditionalist and kind of afraid of too many choices so naturally a medium where risk is greatly mitigated felt intimidating - kind of like the piece could never be finished because there was just too many possible combinations of composition, tone, and value that could now be applied to a good drawing.
So after what - twelve years - i have decided to swallow my pride and insecurities to give this digital drawing thing stab. Gotta say man, it really is fun and so naturally now I feel like I’m late to the party. I know virtually next to nothing about digital drawing programs other than a somewhat outdated working knowledge of Photoshop…Basically, this will be a learning process and will take some time. Above is my first stab at a digital painting. Below are some simple process layers. The piece was made top to bottom on an iPad Pro with Procreate.
Before really going wild, I am trying to just teach myself how to paint as close to my analog work as I can….imperfections and all. While I’m not a loose painter, I have always felt that when working in ink and watercolor like I do - its best to accept that the final piece will have some blemishes to it…bits of line overlap and a little broken color…now that said - its a delicate dance between accepting some warts and having an unfinished looking piece. Time will tell how this translates in pixels but for now I like the first results. This piece actually wasn’t meant to go past the “inks” stage but I decided to dive into learning the color part as its the most intimidating to me. I have a pretty basic process - start with a simple sketch, add inks, lay down some transparent skin tones, add more inks, and then work in with opaques. Finally after that is all complete I will redraw any line work that got obliterated that I wanted to keep. The final illustration was around 22 separate layers….. Here are a few highlights from those layers.
