A New Toy

Before I get to the new toy, here are the drawings done this past week in our group Zoom practice sessions.  First, a lovely blue gate in front of an adobe home, done with ink and watercolor.

Next, some bonsai, also ink with watercolor:

And here is a wonky door/steps -- the original photo was truly odd.

I tried livening it up with some wacky colors -- not entirely successfully, but oh well.  It was fun.  This one was done solely with colored pencils.

Okay, time for the new toy!  

I got an iPad Pro 11 tablet to play with, along with a drawing/painting app called Adobe Fresco.  I had never used any kind of digital art software, though at least some of the options were familiar from Adobe Photoshop, which I've used to adjust photos.  Still, there were a LOT of menu choices, and I had no idea what I was doing.

The brush tool menu offers three different main categories and dozens of brush styles within those, plus you can change each brush via dozens of adjustments. For example, when I selected the "canvas" brush, I had adjustment options that I understood -- size, opacity, flow strength, etc., -- but was also faced with mysterious things.  "Blend" modes offered such choices as "linear burn", "color dodge", "difference", "exclusion", and "subtract"-- there were TWENTY-NINE options for this one adjustment alone!

GAH.  I was lost.

When a brush is selected, and then a color, one uses a stylus to draw on the tablet, and the magic of computers allows the stylus to mimic a real brush.  So I just started playing around with various brushes, and quickly became utterly frustrated.  I came up with truly crappy stuff like this:

What I'd been using were brushes called "live", because they imitate watercolor or oil paint--the colors mix/blend with each other in a very similar way to wet-in-wet painting.  I found them hard to control.  I wanted to do stuff that was more like the colored pencils I've been working with.  

So finally I gave the regular brushes a try instead -- they don't mix (though I believe you can make adjustments to do so), and I was much happier with the control I had over them.  And then I discovered the "smudge" brush tool.  Ah!  It was a revelation.  This tool allowed me to blend the colors exactly the way I wanted to -- lots of ways to adjust it to get precisely the effect I wanted.  

The feel of using the smudge tool was very similar to using the solvent on colored pencils.  Once I figured out how to mimic the colored pencil blending experience, I was so much happier--and off and running!

After a few days of practice, the next time the Zoom sketch group met, I used the iPad and Adobe Fresco to draw this bizarre beetle, in about one hour:

The hardest part was trying to match the colors -- not exact, though not too far off.  

Feeling more confident now, naturally I decided to tackle some Good Omens!

I practiced on this photo of Crowley, which was not high quality.  I imported the photo into Fresco, and drew over it, and then tried to improve the details, just for practice.

My redo wasn't perfect, but it taught me a lot about using the tools.

And it gave me a chance to create parts of the image rather than just copying over them.  For example, here is the eye in the photo:

Not much detail there.   I pretty much painted it out and redid it from scratch:

Next, I got the idea to "correct" some of my colored pencil drawings.  This one, for instance, had textures that were too rough in areas despite the solvent blending, especially in the faces. 

This didn't bother me, actually -- it gives the picture that hand-drawn look that I prefer.  But when I printed it out (for calendars, for example), it looked too blotchy.  So I used Fresco to smooth everything out so I would have a photo I could print from:

Next, tackled an early portrait I did of Crowley before I learned how to blend colored pencils.  It definitely had way too much rough texture:

And it needed a background.  He's talking to his plants in this scene, so I used Fresco to smooth out the portrait, and then drew in some plants:

I'm having lots of fun with my new toy, that's for sure.

The Hounds, however, are not thrilled.  I have clearly been spending far too much time paying attention to that strange device instead of them, and this is how they feel about that:

Well, I'm sure things will settle back into a more normal routine soon.  I hope so, anyway, because my arms are sore!

That's all from here.  Have a great week out there!