Drawing digitally feels like cheating…
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[00:00:00] They had a brilliant question on the Facebook group. It's the private students only Facebook group for find your creative voice, fly your freak flag. But it's such a good question that I thought would bring it here as well. Yeah. Read it out, Katie. So Megan Vandeley, said, I just opened up the Microsoft Surface Pro I bought for digital drawing and I'm freaking out a little.

Not only the expense. Though I bought refurbished, but a sense of cheating or something. Will this kill the joy of drawing on paper? Does anyone combine the analogue and digital drawing worlds? Do you think the [00:01:00] Microsoft Surface Pro is like an iPad? Do you think it's a similar thing? It looks like, yeah, we did a little Google and it looks like a foldy, upy, iPad y thing.

Oh, it's so good. What a brilliant question. What's the last bit of it? Does anybody combine analog and digital? Yeah. Everybody. We're all doing it. Yeah. Everybody. Well, not every, obviously not everybody, but it's so common. Lots of people do. I do. I like to draw on paper, scanning the layers. Yeah.and then put it into Photoshop or Affinity sometimes.

The whole picture is exactly right, but I've drawn the seagull in the wrong place or something, so I scan it in and I just move the seagull across. Tiny things, tiny things. I definitely don't, go in and alter everything on Photoshop or Affinity, but I tweak, we all do, don't we? We all do, yeah. I find it way easier to plan with pencil on actual paper, like plan, have ideas, but then take a photo of it and wrap it into my iPad.

And then do it from there. Yeah, if you can copy that composition [00:02:00] perfectly. Somehow there's a, there can be a warp that goes on when you start off by drawing. either on a tablet or in Photoshop on your screen. I mean, personally, I, I use Wacom tablets. So you're doing that kind of indirect way of drawing on a pad, but looking at the screen. And it's not ideal. When I look at, I enviously look at everyone on Procreate with this. Procreate with the amazing Apple Pencil that's so much, I think it's way more sensitive than the Wacom, but it's what I've got used to and the Photoshop interface and I've always worked with it, but it would be a mix of either using Photoshop brushes to replicate the way I painted and drew or scanning in textures like you were doing.

and layering it and using multiply layers. There's so many things you can do that help you build up a picture that's perhaps quite complex and if you were doing all that in watercolour, a scene with ten people in it, in a street, there's so much that could go wrong. And that, that image would then be ruined by, I don't know, a drip of ink or something.

[00:03:00] You'd have to lay paper on top to repair it. But once you've scanned it in and you can kind of start to finish off things, move things around a bit. Change some of the color hues and stop things being, either if the color's a bit flat and you want to make it more punchy or you want the contrast. There's a lot you can do in Photoshop to help that.

It's all by degrees, isn't it, as well? I've done whole books completely on paper with absolutely nothing digital on. I've done whole books entirely digital with nothing on paper. and everything in between. So I think it's completely up to you. It's just another tool, isn't it? Drawing with a Wacom pencil or an Apple pencil or scanning your drawings in.

It's just another tool. It's not cheating. It's not cheating. That was part of her question, wasn't it? I think it's easy to feel like that, especially if you've been, had it drummed into you, like, oh, you've got to draw, fill sketchbooks, which is really valuable and important. But then when you get to, yeah, there's nothing wrong with drawing digitally.

And also in terms of being paid for your time, you've got to find a workflow that makes the most of that. And [00:04:00] there's, you know, digital interfaces are, make that so much better. I mean, I remember Marion Duchard showing me when she was doing her Bob books and Bob is a quite a simple character, just made of a few elements.

She paints out a few Bobs and then she paints out lots of legs and feet and different heads and eye positions and things like that. And then kind of puts them all together so that the book is a lot easier to do because she can just use bits of different leg positions to show Bob walking or kneeling or jumping without redrawing him from scratch every single time.

And that makes total sense, doesn't it? I think it's, I think when you say handmade versus digital, I always Want to find another way of wording that because if you're making something digitally, it's still handmade because even if you're holding a Wacom pen, it's still your hand and your eyes and your brain.

So it's not handwork, handmade versus digital. It's just, shall I use a tool on paper or shall I use a tool with a screen? Seems like a better [00:05:00] way of wording it. Might cut out the guilt because it's still you, your brain, your eyes, your hand. And you still have to be very You still have to have skill, don't you?

Cause I know we've talked about color in the past and you see when somebody starts using the iPad, if they haven't got color going on, because you've got a choice of every single color on that disc, you could get some horrible color things going on. The Tania's made a workshop on our freebies page, by the way, for a color workshop and it's called the Genius Color Workshop, I think, and that will help you.

Get your head wrapped around color. I keep thinking, yeah, I'd love to do a link between that, the color workshop where we work with paint with just two colors and white paint. And because that constraint, analog constraint, as you're saying, Katie, whole, you know, it creates really interesting work because you have a certain amount of lack of, well, it's a lack of choice, whereas once you're on screen and you can use any color in the world and your palettes go completely haywire, but I'd love to do a [00:06:00] digital version of that paint thing.

I've seen people say that they've done the color workshop using actual blobs of paint to get the colors. They've taken a photo of it and then used the color picker tool in Procreate to use the colors that they made analog, but it would be so cool to do an iPad one or a digital version. It'd be pretty easy to do it as well.

How would you do it? You'd just use multiply layers, wouldn't you? Yeah. You'd pick two colors and overlap them and then do the transparency, like 50 percent transparency. That's what I did. on Procreate, never used a different color on Procreate and I just made layers that overlapped and had different transparencies so you could have a tiny bit of blue over overlapping a quite dense yellow so then you would get a very like limey green or then I would maybe up the transparency of the yellow and make the blue dense and then you get a very bluey green.

Yeah. So it's the same theories. you do in your color workshop with tubes of paint, but digital. We should definitely do a workshop. [00:07:00] Yeah, that would be great to do the digital version of the color workshop. But it brings that thing back to choice as well. Like you could go crazy with the brushes and use a mixture of way too many brushes in an image, which would stop it feeling, I can't think of the word, just designed and planned.

Hang together. You definitely need to choose your favorite brushes and stick to them. Yeah. And sometimes playing around with the sensitivity and the pressure, because I see a lot of people. Like when I try to do graphic recording and scribing. They'll have a pen where it's like got very tapered in and it looks like you'd never use a brush pen like that drawing.

In real life you'd use like a nice chunky, inky pen, like a, I dunno, like a posca pen or something that just abruptly ends. It doesn't taper off. And yeah, things like that, you can go into your brush settings as well. So I download brush like the Vivian Milder Berger brushes are brilliant and she's just brought some out this new year.

I've just downloaded them. They look amazing. But sometimes I will download some brushes and they don't, not her brushes, but some brushes don't feel quite right. And [00:08:00] you can go into the settings of the brushes and you can adjust how they feel and then practice drawing with them. And you can come up by doing that your own brush.

Cause I think one of the problems is. You see work made on Procreate and you can actually recognize the brush. Yes, that's awful. And that's disappointing. It's a bit like, you know, when you got electronic keyboards and you, they had certain sounds on them. You could recognize the sound in a song like, Oh, they've just used that sample.

But it's all back down to being kind of clear and rigid about choices and almost replicating your studio. Say you've only got four decent brushes. And you keep going back to the same four brushes, and you've got some tubes of paint, but you really love that same tube over and again, and you keep mixing it with other colours.

Because of the lack of choice, or the lack of infinity and choice in your studio, you make much more cohesive images. And it can, you know, on Procreate you can just go nuts, or on Photoshop. So you spend the first six months trying out every single thing, making chaotic images that [00:09:00] don't seem to have a a design or visual decision taken about them and no, no rules applied to them.

I feel like you've got to use the same rules that you use on paper. So, If you get an image down, don't keep going back in and overworking it, live with the things that went wrong in the picture because they probably do something important emotionally to the drawing. Don't zoom in, don't like really zoom in on one area and draw in detail in that area and then pull back out because your eye will always be drawn to that little bit where you did a very, very detailed bird with a smaller pen.

It looks completely different to the rest of the picture. Yeah. really. You need to keep a brush library and a color library. Yeah. So when you go back to an image, say you did something for a client or for yourself, it's a set of images and then you want to add to that.

You have to remember what the brushes were that you used and what the color, it's easy to use the colors because you just eyedropper them again and set up a new palette. But if you can't remember the pencil or the brush that you used to get that feeling again it's quite difficult. But I'm not organized enough to set up these [00:10:00] palettes so I just sort of wing it.

But I love the idea that you just make. very limited option palettes for all these things like texture, brush, pen, and colour, and put, and file those with the work. Yeah, I suppose it's going to be easier if you go, if you're going from traditional to digital, that transition is probably less clunky if you have a firmer idea of what your work is and what you What your freak flag is and what your creative voice is rather than going into the iPad and being like, what am I doing here?

Cause that's when I feel like you get the crazy rainbow drawings and horrible brushes and stuff. But then I don't know, maybe if you're starting out on the iPad or digital surface pro, whatever it is. figuring out your creative voice from there. Do you think it's harder because you've got more choice?

Yeah. I think it's much easier to start on paper and really, really play on paper and kind of work out what your work is. Well, maybe we think that cause that's the way we've done it. I was wondering, I don't know. It's our perspective and it's not right. Perhaps you can spend six [00:11:00] months. on, some kind of digital software, berserking until you get really bored and start going, God, it's such a cliche rainbow.

Like you say, that brush is so showy and I don't want to use it. Get it out of your system. And then, but if it still presents you with so much choice, and if you haven't learned how to limit choice, to create a strength to your voice, it's much easier to do that with paper. But there must be so many students coming out of art school who just went digital immediately and have done everything digital.

And we probably have seen their work and love it. Maybe, maybe we had endless choice when we went in the art shop. You know, I don't know. It's really interesting. But you can see people who've, you know, have always been digital and they do have these clear, you know, clear design ideas. Like you can see on an Instagram, they've used the same palette for at least a year.

Like, whoa, good on you. You know, you've decided what it is you like, you've kept to it. You've used the same texture in combination with something else. [00:12:00] So it's a I think graphic designers are very good at thinking like that because they know that they have to figure out what three fonts have been used on a project, what two or three colors.

So there's those limitations. If your brain can think like that, it's okay. But it's just tempting to get all the toys in the sweet, all the toys in the toy shop and use all of them at once on the same picture. Yeah. I feel like the iPad is less forgiving as well. Maybe like when you're messing around in a sketchbook, it's a bit more forgiving.

But then again, maybe I do just think that because. And from a time before iPads were useful for drawing on, sketchbooks. So it's that AI thing as well, that, you know, sometimes digital, well there's AI and digital painting sometimes has that fuzzy sheen when it's too perfect. Yeah, it's like a, you can smell it in an image.

I think my eyes just crave handmade. And by that I mean, I don't just mean stuff on paper, but I mean [00:13:00] handmade digitally or on paper, but you can really see the human in it. Yeah. You really, really crave that. I read this, end of year review from Bright Agency where they were addressing the, the AI question.

And they said, it's going to be quite difficult for people who produce very highly rendered, highly colored, realistic sort of, it could be fantasy realistic imagery because that's what AI is eating up at the moment. And clients are really looking for a lot more hand drawn imagery, whether, again, that could be on Procreate and it's the way you draw.

So there is a kind of return to that human mark and fallibility and, you know, rather than hyper polished stuff, which is, is going to struggle. Yeah. It's good to rebel against. The AI stuff. Yes. Does, does our, sorry, I've forgotten her name, our letter writer. Does she also ask if it'll take the fun out of her work?

I think she did. That's really interesting. [00:14:00] Cause I, I got really into working digitally and found it a lot of fun while I was learning it and then made a book on it using just my iPad. And then afterwards thing thought, actually, I don't think I enjoyed that as much as. Being in my studio with the rain pouring on the window above my head, dog up my feet, pieces of paper, paint.

It wasn't the same experience. I felt a bit headachy and dizzy from being on my screen too much. It's nice to be unblogged, isn't it? Yeah. For me, it did tick, even though I love it and there's so much great about working digitally and I like the results you can get. Did take some of the fun out of it for me, and I went back to paper.

Yeah, Megan did say, will this kill the joy of drawing on paper? So, it's the opposite. Maybe it makes the joy of drawing on paper more joyful because, like when you get an e book and you get excited about having a Kindle, but then when you go back to a real book and you can sniff the pages and smell the ink, you're like, Oh, it's so good.

[00:15:00] It's so surprising that she asked that question in that direction. Yeah, I think I'm a bit muddled. Is she saying, would I lose the joy of paper if I love the digital? Is that what she said? That's what I thought she said. Is it a sense of cheating or something? Will this kill the joy of drawing on paper?

Does anyone combine them? Wow, no. No, I don't think it'll kill the joy of paper. Why the reverse? I don't think you can kill the joy of drawing on paper. It's not possible. It's always joyful, isn't it? I could really do with an art club right now. Yeah, right now. Because it's just to suddenly draw on paper for playful reasons.

So good. It is a revelation when you've been slogging away, doing vectors on a screen. Sliding around on that glass screen and it's like, ugh. Yeah, exactly. Frying your eyeballs. Just accidentally getting some cheap paper and the ink spreads all over it because it's not very good quality. Oh, lovely. Yeah, accidents.

You need to be able to keep the accidents. If you go digital, you need to keep the accidents and don't edit them [00:16:00] out. Actually, once I worked on the computer for so long that when I was out driving and I nearly had an accident, I thought, don't worry, I'll just do Apple Z.

Come on Z, come on Z. Come on Z. That was terrible. I was like, I've been taken over by the, Apple undo. And you think everything can be undone, so if you're making work with a continual undoneness, your perfectionism and your, you know, a bit of inadequacy or imposter syndrome, you could spend a whole day just doing apple and do and end up with one line on a piece of paper.

As opposed to the commitment to drawing and drawing a mark that can't be undone. I want to go and do that right now. Yeah. So we could talk about this for hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In answer to your question, lots of people combine it and know it won't take the fun away from drawing on paper. And it's not cheating.

But it is a tool and you might get bored of it as well. And just go back to drawings. Yeah, that's all fine. . Okay. Okay. Bye. Bye. [00:17:00]