Working Digitally

I've been working with much more digital illustration recently. I love the process of painting but a recent project convinced me that time and quality could be improved by complimenting my traditional techniques with digital skills.

If I'm honest, I was a bit scared by the digital world - when you first start to work with Photoshop it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of choices.  Luckily, there are Youtube videos for almost every question you might have.

I found Procreate and Adobe Draw, both iPad applications, and downloaded them to try.

Procreate is great tool for a traditional artist as it allows you to draw onto the screen with an Apple Pencil and, once I had the hang of it, I found it was very similar to traditional drawing, with the exception that if I made a mistake I could delete it very easily without looking for a physical eraser.

Those of you who do work digitally will understand when I say that layers are the biggest challenge - often I would be trying to alter something, and nothing was happening on screen.  A quick check would  reveal that I am working on the wrong layer.

Adobe Draw works along the same principles, except the files produced are scaleable vectors and there is a shape trace image which is fantastic for drawing perfect circles etc.

I have used both of them extensively over the last couple of months, and am pretty pleased with the results if I do say so myself.

Do you prefer traditional drawing or using digital tools?  Let me know.

Helen x.