Digital drawing

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Art by Ozoneocean, page of my recent update

I'm using Banes' newspost absence to talk about digital media. Here's an intro of sorts. I'll talk more in coming weeks

I'm a self taught artist who got formal training. I started out drawing with paper and pencil, but I also learned to use chalk and oil pastels, charcoal, watercolours, acrylics, oils, clay, etching and a million other things… But some time around 2001 I got myself a great big Wacom Intuous and started drawing digitally. The big advantages are that you can work at any size, you can save many versions of your work, don't have to worry about set up space, storage space, mess, expense of materials, set up time, or loss of quality when you adapt the work.

That last one was the biggest problem for me as an artist: whether you scan, photograph, or slide photograph your work to transfer it to digital there is a huge loss of quality between the stages.
Physical media has many advantages though: digital art often has a "samey" sort of look about it depending on the programs people use, whereas physical media looks rougher and "realer" due to the textures involved, how it reflects or absorbs light and how it changes over time. With physical media you have a tactile record of your art you can show people… And a painting looks better in a frame than a print.

Over the 15 years or so I've been doing digital art my practice hasn't changed much. I got myself a Wacom Cintiq, tried many different versions of Photoshop, then moved on to using Android devices- the Samsung Note range, because it uses the same proven Wacom technology. These offer a lot of freedom and versatility, they're light, durable and incredibly portable so you can take your digital art anywhere. The main disadvantage though is that they're not as powerful as a full computer so there are some limitations as to what you can do (size, resolution and number of layers). For this reason I generally use them only for rough sketches and finish my art on a full computer.

In coming weeks I'll talk about how exactly I go about a drawing on a mobile device.