So we’ve got a bit of a change of pace for these food still lifes this week. My watercolors are packed away…somewhere and my office is as clean as it’s been in years and I didn’t want to spoil it. Thus a digital painting!
There are many advantages to painting digitally and they include easier set-up, less space required, less mess, the layers feature is rather handy, and crtl+Z*. Also, as my art career has almost never involved selling original paintings/drawings anything I create using traditional media has to be scanned in anyway to be reproduced. Creating digitally from the beginning cuts out a step. Depending on what it is, a lot of times these days I draw faster on the computer than on paper.
However there are some things that traditional media can do that digital can’t. I personally like the art that I make to show my hand, for the marks I make to not be smoothed over. Doing this while still making the image look painterly is something that I’ve been working on for years, and it’s more difficult for me in some ways than doing a very tight, realistic drawing. With traditional media I can just let the paint or whatever do its thing, especially when it something like watercolor that’s a bit tricky to control in the first place. With digital media it’s a bit more of a fight. Making the image look all smooth and airbrushy is the easier option as the randomness that happens when paint drips needs to be replicated by some very complicated math in the graphics program.
One of these apples has since been eaten.
*Sometimes I’ll try and use this function when drawing in my sketchbook. It doesn’t work.
