learning and sketching

I've been working on my facility with digital art lately. I may be most comfortable with creating work on paper and then painting it digitally, as I'm doing for a current project:

Watercolour brushes and techniques from Kyle T Webster!

My Bamboo tablet and Photoshop are my tools of choice, although I've seen amazing work on Corel Painter, Paint Tool Sai and a relatively new open-source program called Krita.

But I'm still most comfortable with pen, paints and paper. Sometimes you are seized with inspiration and need to get something on record RIGHT NOW. A digital illustration still takes me many hours and a lot of equipment. So when, for example, one of my favourite actors appears at my place of work and I want to commemorate the experience...

I still grab my notebook instead of my tablet. I do hope to be equally quick on the draw with both someday!

Inkscape inkspace

I don't think Inkscape is something I 'taught myself' so much as I just fell into it with a burning resentment because my computer can't handle Illustrator right now.

But I'm starting to feel my way around it a bit better, and there is nothing on earth anymore that YouTube won't show you how to do.

So a relative asked me to do some work for the banner header of their personal blog and they wanted an arrow with a pen nib point. 

Some sketches I did:

The designer came up with some pegs for me, to streamline the process. A dip pen point instead of the fountain pen, a burnished antique look.

This is the first thing I did off of one of the pegs from the designer: a Roman pen. She wanted it for the arrow shaft.

This is the final illustration:

Sketches app

There is a new free drawing app for the iPad called Sketches. I downloaded it and it's great!

It has brush pen, felt tip marker and paintbrush as discrete tools. There's only one brush size for each unless you buy the Pro version (£1.49!), but the brush pen and technical pen make up for each other. It's quite sensitive, and you need to pick the option to undo via button because the 'backwards swipe' undo just makes a mark on your drawing. But I like it much more than Paper!