2022/12/23: 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.

2023/12/03: 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.