DIGITAL DRAWING

As well as working on my painting skills, I have been trying my hand at digital drawing and it is SO MUCH FUN! I'm lucky enough to get to borrow my boyfriend's iPad Pro which has Procreate on it, a very cool digital illustration app.

When I first started drawing digitally I was RUBBISH, and seriously overwhelmed by all of the available brushes and tools. You draw onto the ipad with an apple pencil, and it has a screen cover which feels like you are drawing on paper, but it's still pretty intimidating if you don't know what you are doing. Thanks to lockdown, I've had lots of time to practice though, and while I've still got a long way to go, I'm pretty happy with where I'm going!

The beauty of digital drawing is the magical delete button. If you do something wrong, or it doesn't quite look right, just delete it! And you can copy and paste, resize, use fancy texture brushes, whatever you like! 

I've found because I've been working on using traditional media (watercolours and gouache paintings) as well as digital drawings, progress I've made in one area has really benefitted others. I've practiced anatomy and capturing likeness in my paintings, which makes faces look better in my procreate paintings. I've experimented and stopped being afraid of making mistakes digitally, which means I can take what works and apply it the next time I paint something. It's been such an amazing learning tool!

Another fun feature of procreate is that you can see a timelapsed recording of your art - which is very helpful if you, like me, are making it up as you go along, and then can watch it back to see what did/didn't work! You can see a timelapse of my Valentine drawing on insta here.

I'm a big fan of bright and bold colours and characters, so I draw a lot of cool girls, but it still feels like such a novelty to produce something that actually looks like a person. I have been trying to wean myself just off painting pinterest models (this video made me think about the references I'm using), although it is easy to get suckered in by the beautiful styling! 

I think my next challenge is trying to get more confident in digital techniques (up until now I've used the same approach, whether it's paint or on screen), and work towards finding that ever elusive 'style'.