December 2022: Resurgence of Interest in Drawing

I owned an Apple iPad (9”) for about a year, having gotten it for navigation during my road trips to the Southwest. I had been doing landscape photography since 2004, with the purpose of gathering material for paintings. I soon became hooked on digital photography, and for almost the next 18 years didn’t do any drawing or painting. I stopped going to my weekly life drawing workshops and spent many hours editing and organizing my photos with Adobe Photoshop.

One day in late 2022, I somehow stumbled onto the idea that I could do drawings on my iPad using the Apple Pencil, which I had recently discovered. I did a little research and found that I could indeed do all kinds of digital drawings on the iPad, using an app called Procreate. Since it was only $10, I decided to give it a try. I became totally enthralled with all the things I could do with the new medium, and began producing drawings using the photos I had been taking all those years. By that time I had accumulated over 15,000 photos that were good enough to be used as references for my drawings. Needless to say, I was totally hooked on making digital drawings, and continued to do them every day since then.

December 2023: From Drawing to Painting

During my first year of making digital art, I began toying with the idea of making paintings. Although I had dabbled in painting many years before, I had completed only one or two successful paintings (by successful I mean I was please with them). Late in 2023 I organized a little studio in the corner of a bedroom. I already had the equipment I needed: a table easel for painting and a tripod, some brushes and a few tubes of paint, mostly alkyd oils and some acrylics. I rigged up the table easel on the tripod and made a tray for holding a palette just below the painting. I am still using this rig, and it works well. I also started watching YouTube videos on painting, and worked out a process I could use to start with. My plan was to make a good digital study of a landscape, using one of my photos as a reference, then transfer it onto canvas and turn it into a painting. It was very intimidating at first, since I had almost no experience using paint, but was able to make a couple of decent paintings by the end of 2023.

Initially I used the grid method to transfer my digital drawings onto the canvas. This was a tried an true technique that has been around since before the Renaissance, and I had used it before. Procreate has a grid tool where you can make a grid overlay onto any image, with any number of squares you want, so this was a relatively task. Initially I would sketch the outlines of the drawing onto the canvas using a CreataColor chalk holder with black chalk, then go over it with burnt Sienna to refine the shapes and overall design. After the first layer of burnt Sienna, I used a mixture of ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and burnt Sienna to establish some of the darker areas and define the shapes a bit more. From there, it was simply a matter of scrubbing in the shapes with approximate colors, then adding successive layers of paint to amplify and refine the colors, shapes, values and lines.

January 2026: Developing the Process

Continuing my process as before, I have started to experiment with a tinted canvas, using different colors such as a mixture of cadmium red light plus yellow ocher. I have also tried to limit my brush size to 4 and 6 long flats, to force myself to to avoid putting in too much detail.

Last year, I also abandoned canvas tablet sheets and started using canvas panels. These take up a little more storage space than the sheets, being thicker, but will enable me to mount the paintings in a floater frame, a much simpler process than using a standard frame with mats and backing board. I started with Blick panels, but noticed they tend to warp after applying a layer of gesso, so I switched to Winsor & Newton canvas panels. These are much more solid, but still economical, and do not warp. They also offer a finer texture of canvas for a better painting surface. My plan is to stay with 12x16” panels until I feel like I have my process nailed down pretty well, then switch to 18x24” panels. I don’t when this will happen, but I am making good progress.

I also thought it would be a good idea to start making master studies of some of my favorite painters from the past. These include Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wayne Thibaud, Jose Clemente Orozco, and others. I hope to absorb some of the stylistic elements from each of these artists. Soon I plan to start using an impasto gel mixed with acrylic paints, in order to develop some more surface textures.

I am working 5-6 nights a week for about 3 hours, and expect to produce about 2 paintings per week.By the end of 2026, I believe I’ll be ready to start looking for a gallery to show my paintings.