I’m trying to learn digital art as a new creative outlet.
I started earlier this month(September 2024) on an iPad with an apple pencil. I had some previous experience with doodling on pencil and paper from trying to get into drawing many years ago, but my experience with fundamentals such as perspective, proportion, and anatomy are very rudimentary. My goal is to focus on portraits and human body drawings for now.
1 – Starting Level:
This was the baseline I started out with at the beginning of the month.
These drawings were done from imagination but all knowledge of drawing I retained from pencil & paper were only for drawing the shoulders upward. Definitely not starting from nothing, but you can see obvious areas for improvement for my fundamentals.
Areas of Improvement:
- Poor contrast: lack of values in the shadows and lights
- Poor linework: these drawings have very chicken-scratchy linework. You can tell I didn’t really have confidence in my lines and at this point I didn’t realize how bad linework affected the final product.
- Suspicious anatomy of hair and facial structure
2 – Drawing from Reference + Layers
I tried to move from portraits to full body but all my drawings looked REALLY disproportional. I instead moved to drawing from reference because I realized that I needed them to learn construction at my level. I also started to try using layers in my workflow which helped on iterating aspects of my drawing.
Compared to the initial day, the values and linework do seem to be improved. Redoing linework on a separate layer from my sketch layer became an important part of my workflow after this.
Areas of Improvement:
- Deconstruction & Construction: The image shown is actually pretty noticeably different than the reference. At this point, I wanted to look into deconstruction of reference into shapes and angles to get a more accurate drawing.
- Linework: Even though the linework is a step up from pure chicken-scratches, you can see how they are still wobbly and unconfident. Improvement will come with time as I focus on this more
- Hair: My hair here still doesn’t follow a proper system for drawing. This is likely the biggest area of improvement when reviewing this drawing.
- Shading: You can see the shading here is very muddy. I tried using smudging like when drawing on pencil but I think my inexperience is quite clear. The values themselves also do not seem to have enough contrast between light and dark.
3 – Full Body Attempt:
After trying to draw from reference, I learned some more deconstruction and construction. At this point I hoped to be able to draw some full body drawings that didn’t look horrid.
Learning deconstruction helped a ton in getting semi-accurate body drawings! I think my muddy values from the last drawing also made me really want to exaggerate the contrast in this one which came out to be a great benefit. I think this piece is in-line with my best attempts on paper-and-pencil so at this point my ability to work in Digital is similar to pencil & pencil.
Areas of Improvement:
- Clothes: I did not have confidence to draw the clothes from reference. I think I need to look into clothes drawing fundamentals and tutorials.
- Hands and Feet: Being the first time in this process I’m trying to do full body, there obviously are some weaknesses and inexperience in drawing the body. I think the hands and feet especially are areas where I need to study how to draw.
- Hair: The hair is improved from the last piece, but it still has a lot of improvement in linework and construction that is apparent. The lines are very stiff.
- Shading: The shading is improved in this piece but the hair still looks like patchy in which areas are covered by virtual pigment. I used inking in the corset of this drawing, and wanted to see how it would do in hair for my next drawing.
4 – Inking:
Areas I wanted to work on were definitely hair and smooth pigment placement. I had some success in higher contrast in the last piece so I wanted to lean into that, and I also looked into how inking brushes worked on Procreate. Here is the result.
The difference that inking brushes had in how smooth the blacks felt really amazed me! You can really tell how the contrast of darks and lights help this piece pop more than the previous ones. There are also gradual improvements in linework and shapes compared to previous pieces. Overall, I do appreciate how much more approachable inking is in Digital than in traditional mediums.
Areas of improvement:
- Hand proportions: Hands on the reference picture were actually a little confusing as well. Lack of hand construction knowledge didn’t help me when trying to correct the hand proportions.
- Halftones: The values for this piece are basically hard black and hard white. There is very little use of greys which I think is a complexity that I can’t implement in a way to improve the picture yet.
5 – Drawing OC using COLOR:
At this point, I feel like I gained enough experience in digital art to where it at least was preferable for me over my previous experience in pencil. Now I wanted to try to see if I could use a reference for posing and drawing my own hair, clothes, face to create a drawing as an Original Work.
This was practically my first time trying to draw with color. I used blending modes like multiply, color/linear burn, soft-light which are purely tools that are available in Digital Art. The funny thing is that when trying to fix my shading for color, it actually inadvertently helped my value contrast in Black & White. A lot of the hatching textures on the bag and shading are ripped from my studies in previous references. Overall, I’m fairly happy at this point with how the Digital Art workflow works for me compared to traditional.
Areas of Improvement:
- Facial proportions: I think I did make some mistakes in constructing the facial proportion here.
- Hands and Feet: I actually think I could draw from this construction some fairly OK feet, but I think it would still be jarring enough to be out of place in the drawing. I do need to do more focused learning for how to draw hands and feet.
- Shading & Blending: This piece is using a greyscale-to-color workflow. I think I really like the process and want to get good at it in the future! However, I did use the blending layers here without really knowing what they do. Hopefully doing some more structured learning on them allows me to apply color better and also improve my shading as well.
- Clothes: Just like in my first full-body drawing, these clothes I drew and very form fitting as I do not have the confidence in drawing more baggy clothes with more complex folds.
6 – More on Shading / Light:
This piece was drawing someone else’s character description, focusing more on learning shading / light. The shading of the last piece (day 22) used more of the reference shading, while this piece was my try at shading from imagination from the existing forms present. There are things I find stronger in the previous piece, but I think there’s a bunch of things I learned from this one.
- trying to imitate bounce light from the floor / hair onto other parts of the body
- form of the face is notably a bit better
- learned to use hues as shadows instead of multiplying pure black
Areas of Improvement:
- Hair: Hair is the biggest area of improvement that could improve this piece. Separation of front, middle, and back hair seems fairly poor. Most noticeable in how the bangs seem like a clip-on
- Shadow selection: I think the levels of shadows in this piece are inconsistent. For example, the underside of the legs seems like it should have a stronger shadow than the dress since it’s fully covered. However, if I shaded it too dark then the form of the body would seem a bit vague.
Reflection
I think I’m very happy with how much I’ve learned in this first transition into Digital Drawing. A lot of the improvement shown is actually relearning a lot of things in Digital but I also think Digital allows fast iteration that enables structured learning in a much faster way. If I had to try to relearn to draw again on pencil & paper, I feel like I’d plateau around the Day 13 mark because the improvement I did see after that was due to the approachability of Digital(inking, coloring, deconstruction & construction). Most importantly though, I think I’ve hit the point where I’m having a lot of fun drawing again and hopefully I can stick to it in the long term!