Written by: Samantha Hass
I’ve been drawing ever since I was a preschooler; if you had run into me as a kid, chances are you’d find me with a marker in hand, scrawling on a piece of printer paper. Over the years, I’d be drawing with some type of pen rather than a pencil — a tool that can’t be erased. That sort of permanency is special because it’s an assertion that what you’re doing is real and can’t be undone; there’s a beautiful kind of feeling, an energy, that comes from guiding your pen on a piece of paper and watching your work unfold before you. There’s something about the physicality of it, the immediacy of seeing your strokes on the page, that brings satisfaction. It’s a satisfaction that I recognized back then, and it’s one that I appreciate even now. I think that type of feeling is why it has taken me so long to attempt digital art seriously. It took me up until my sophomore year of college to even consider digital art as an option for me.
I’ve been rendering digital drawings for almost two years now, and it’s been a slow yet fascinating transition. I have a lot of artist friends that have been drawing digitally for years, since before high school, even. We’d often have conversations about me at least trying to draw digitally to see if I’d like it. At the time, I only expressed hesitance: “It’s not the same,” I’d say, and I would proceed to complete every art assignment I’ve had on paper.
The shift in my perspective happened during my sophomore year of college when I joined the Daily Campus, UConn’s student-run newspaper, as a contributing artist. At the time, I was so eager to start publishing comics and illustrations in the paper that I didn’t even think about the logistics of trying to turn in traditionally drawn works for publication. Every other artist at the newspaper, save for a couple, would draw their comics and illustrations digitally, which would make for better accessibility when sending and uploading their files. I quickly realized that drawing traditionally was unsustainable for this position; in addition to making my illustrations on paper, I would have to scan my pieces and upload them to my computer for publication, which resulted in bad lighting or poor image quality a lot of the time. So, my minimal curiosity for potentially doing art digitally was exacerbated by the situation.
I ended up receiving an iPad for my birthday soon after, which immediately prompted my purchase of the drawing software Procreate, upon recommendation. This was my first big step into taking digital art seriously, after a life of predominantly drawing traditionally. I will say that in the beginning, it was a learning curve. The feeling of drawing on a screen surface felt much different than drawing on the realness of paper. Then there was the process of learning how to draw on layers — when it comes to digital art, you can draw different components of your piece on different pages that are overlayed. This makes it in theory easier to adjust certain components of an art piece, but using layers was a very, very foreign concept to me as a traditional artist who was used to building the drawing up on one singular, physical canvas. I believe that now I am confident with using these tools, though I don’t claim to be an expert in digital art, either. I feel like I’m still learning more about what I can do with the software every day. But it has been one of the greatest things I think I could have tried to teach myself, especially since it makes my art process so much more forgiving. Now, I can make comics so easily; if I ever draw a haphazard shape, I can simply hit the undo button and try again, without having to worry about the rest of the piece being redrawn. I can also Airdrop files to myself quickly and do whatever conversions I see fit. I can use different layers to sketch out panels, for example, and not have those interfere with the layer that I use ink on, or the layer that I use color on.
Initially, my hesitance to seriously get into digital art stemmed from the fact that I thought it wouldn’t be the same as seeing and feeling my marks appear on a page, that it wouldn’t feel real, like I was an artist producing a physical, creative work. And, in that sense, I suppose I was correct — it’s not the same. But it doesn’t have to be. Digital drawing is a method I can use for specific purposes, like making comics for the newspaper. My shift into using digital art does not mean that my love for traditional art is weakening. I recognize that I can continue to develop my traditional art skills while branching into something new; everything has its time and place. I cannot wait to see what sort of digital art I am able to explore in the future, and I cannot wait to see what kinds of other art techniques I can learn as well.
Featured Image Caption: Though not the same as drawing on paper, drawing on a digital surface still offers endless creative possibilities that suit specific needs.
