The Love Affair with Digital Drawing

I'm not sorry that I'll probably gush about my new display tablet high for a while, but I'd also like to continue to talk about the pros and cons I come across, as well as how I make lemons into lemonade.

I've talked before about how Macs, while often perfect for my needs, aren't exactly flawless. For one, any lingering updates often gum things up. My Macs are also almost a decade old so they're not exactly spring chickens. My display driver got temperamental with me a couple of times, but the fixes were easy enough that it was only a hiccup. So here are a few of those incidents:

1.  Pen stopped working, mouse worked fine- this actually wasn't just from the pen running out of juice. I switched pens and it persisted. I keep the driver option in my Dock so it's always accessible and opened it up. Without doing anything else, the pen decided to work again. I got this.
2. Mouse left click not working at all- couldn't figure this one out, even with mouse settings. Restarting fixed this one.
3. Mouse left-click works but drop menus don't stay open- this only seems to happen on the display screen. It don't want no mouse telling it what to do. Using the pen seems to be the only way it works properly. Not a huge problem, but when I'm flipping between the display and the Mac screen, it's a little inconvenient to switch around.

Not a problem if you're good at wrestling computers, but calling this a beginner's tablet is deceptive. There are some other issues I've seen people mention before but, again, nothing too distracting. Because of the extreme angles of the display as it spreads towards the edges, the parallax (that fancy word for the gap between the stylus tip and the cursor's actual place) starts to wander a bit. I don't often get anywhere near the edges anyway, and it's less than an inch of screen all around where the change is noticeable. If you're used to digital drawing, it's not unfamiliar. Hell, if you have a small mouse pad, you already know the unconscious lift and adjust fix. In this case, zoom out if you need more room for a fluid line or drag and recenter.

It's nothing like drawing on paper. However, using a digital display, especially a big one, teaches you how to adjust for that. Using a screenless tablet, I was constantly trying to turn it like paper, which does the exact opposite you think you want it to. There are certain motions in your wrist that make perfect circles more attainable, certain gestures you get used to that will need a different solution. You absolutely can rotate a digital page, especially easy if you set a rotary slide key to do so, but I've found it's better to simply train your digital hand differently, or make use of tools to utilize shape. Learn how to use vector shapes alongside freehand.

If you're a beginner, a new learning curve will usually feel like it's just making things take longer or is more difficult. The tutorials you watch will take ten minutes to show you the ins and outs of what should take a few seconds. And for an advanced user, it actually does go quicker. The things that you must do to accomplish it become auto-tasks but it takes a lot of practice and trial and error.

Artists aren't necessarily bragging when they call a complex looking piece a 'doodle'. Given, some are badly lying about how quick it was done, but a good deal of them have taken months, years, decades to achieve that kind of result. It wasn't just the ten minutes they threw down to do it, but the discipline and practice that connected the quickest routes to the problem.

It used to take me several hours just to color a picture digitally, and I'm talking just the base colors with little shading. Color basing typically never takes more than an hour for a full page piece now. The line drafting, again, generally takes me anywhere from five minutes to an hour, depending on the complexity. Shading and detailing is where artists tend to camp out most; looking at two to twenty hours for most pictures but can easily pile on to hundreds if they choose to keep playing. Customizing tools, filters and textures is another place that can wind on for a long time.

The time crunch is pretty inconsequential to how well it's done. The demands of the problem and the workflow can help, but a deadline can help or hurt the turn-out. I often toggle layers just to experiment, but don't keep them around for the final presentation. Sometimes I just want to try something out without risking the work already done. I'll duplicate shading layers if I'm tempted to overwork them, just because it's hard to come back from a shading experiment gone wrong without starting over. Best to preserve it at certain stages then hide the evidence of overwork elsewhere. Sometimes the difference is just between wanting a soft blend or a darker, starker version. I can switch between the two and decide which I like better.

Of course, there are brave artists who blend it all on one layer like you would with an actual painting. I'm never that brave. I'll keep my alternating blends separate but also flatten out the layers in a duplicate to do the final blend (catching anywhere the overlays do make multiple layers too obvious). Print will inevitably punish any of your glaring mistakes. Obviously, print only has a flat dimension so all digital paintings can't escape that one.

There are always 'better' ways of doing things. There's nothing wrong with being secure in your knowledge while maintaining an openness to learning a way better suited to the task. Beginners often get discouraged because they aren't instant prodigies. Or if they do start out successful, they don't improve because of overconfidence and rigidity in their workflow.

Being open to possible issues is a very important part of enjoying and improving digital painting. You can't just look at the big picture. There are so many steps, so many techniques, so many reasons why it's better to honestly assess what you don't like in order to avoid doing that again and again. I'm not sure why some artists are so shy about mistakes or formative work. Sharing them is a better opportunity to gain insight into taste and technique.

I'm not one for organizing videos but there are already tons out there to display the amount of work that goes into solving and optimizing a visual. Watched a particularly interesting one from a YouTube Channel called Jazza where the guy goes on Fiverr to commission people to draw particular pieces of art based on his quick sketch and it's quite interesting how some artists undersell their talents while others might be a bit overpriced, especially when they exclude certain elements asked for. It gave even me some insight into how important it is to consider the market value of what I produce. What someone pays should advertise what they can expect in the quality of work. Making that too unstable makes it more difficult to justify how much time you'll spend on a project.

Anyhoo, enough digital babbling. More to work on this weekend, both reading and drawing, but crossing my fingers it fuels my urge to write as well.