Do you love the magical power of the Un-Do button that comes with drawing digitally? The freedom, the sense of possibility and the multitudes of textures at your fingertips? You’re not alone!
In response to my post last week about the ongoing relevance (or not) of the analogue cartooning process, I received a wonderful response from a reader outlining her three reasons why drawing digitally has a lot to offer.
Of course it’s not a matter of either/or
It’s really what you have available. What Yvonne and I agreed is that both drawing digitally and using pencil and paper have their advantages. Here are her points, lightly edited:
1. Play
Digital drawing encourages play, and play is what we need to build skills. The power of undo and the ability to easily duplicate drawings allows experimentation and taking risks so you can rapidly build a stack of drawings to see your progress. FEAR holds so many people back because it overwhelms and distracts – drawing digitally removes much of that fear through play, more so than working on paper.
2. Constraints allow Focus
As with learning any skill, constraints are a powerful tool for managing distractions and focussing. You already use constraints for analogue cartooning to manage distraction, so do the same for digital drawing digitally! For example, you can limit the brushes and layers you use and set some time rules.
3. No Barrier to Entry
You take your smartphone everywhere, it’s very portable and always close to your hand. The Procreate app is cheap, we all have fingers that we can use on the screen, and if you have a stylus like a Pencil, it’s completely intuitive to use on a tablet.
And this is where I pick things up again…
Helping you avoid the Fish Food Effect
Drawing digitally can feel rather like adding to many food-flakes to a goldfish bowl – initially there’s a lot of gulping excitement but then overwhelm makes a fishy feel sluggish?
Here are some concrete suggestions for how you can harness those ideas for quicker digital drawing progress, specifically in Procreate because that is the app that was referenced above.
Shall I unpack them?
Limit the Brushes
Procreate has a lot of brushes. (“Brush” is a blanket term used to refer to any kind of mark-making selection. A ‘brush’ could produce lines like pencil, pen or nib, splotch or cover like paint, or add fancy effects and textures). I don’t know how many there are, but for starters I recommend you use the following:
- within “Inking” — technical pen for initial sketching and outlining; studio pen for bolder outlining; gel pen for simple hand written text
- from the “Painting” section — the round brush. You can play with its opacity from 100% down to 1%
- in the “Luminance” section — the Bokeh Lights effect lets you add a little magical sparkle anywhere you like
2 bonus brushes that you might like to try are
- Ink Bleed — for outlining with a wonderful, gritty texture (from the Inking section)
- Soft Pastel — a tactile experience to indulge your Inner Child (from the Sketching section)
Here’s a video about these brushes:
Limit the Layers
Again, Procreate allows you a lot of layers, and you can easily get lost in your layers. The power of layers when drawing digitally is that you can separate different parts of your drawing process which makes it easier to fix things as you go along without ‘breaking’ what is already working.
In case you don’t know yet, here is how layers work. Each layer stacks on top of the previous one, so how you order them matters. Think of it like this: you take a pencil and draw something on a page. Then you take a pen (new layer) and draw over the pencil marks. And finally you take a crayon (new layer) and colour within the ink lines.
I recommend that you use just 4 layers initially: the Background Colour (leave it white and draw nothing in that layer); Layer 1 (do your initial sketching in this layer); Layer 2 (colour goes here, ‘sandwiched’ between sketch and outline); Layer 3 (do your ‘clean’ black outlines in this layer).
Here’s a video that demonstrates using these layers
Limit the Time
The best way I know of to stay focused is to set a timer. If you are short of time but you want to make progress, 15 minutes will do. With a little more time to spare, 30 minutes. And then stop, and leave whatever you are working on. When you revisit it tomorrow, it will likely look much better than it does now. It’s amazing how sleeping on something enhances our objectivity.
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Learning the basics of Procreate will speed you on your way if you are drawing on an iPad. The Procreate Parachute self-study course is a great starting point.
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This post grew out of a comment conversation with Yvonne Everett. The discussion was fun and we shared a fair bit of information. You can read our original comment thread on this post:
Three reasons why the analogue cartooning process is still relevant