Digital Sy

What blasphemy is this!?

I got myself a new toy! One of them fancy tablets with a screen in 'em. Don't worry though- I have no plans on going digital.

You may be wondering why I'd bother to do this, then! Well, lemme explain. I run into a lot of problems during the drawing stage of a picture that I suspect wouldn't even be an issue if I was drawing digitally. For example, if I'm working on a character and notice eventually that the neck is too long, I can just shift the head down a little instead of completely redrawing the head. Or if I'm planning out a character and find I've run out of page space, I can just resize or shift them around a bit instead of completely starting that planning stage over.

One extremely annoying issue I face very often is that I'll start with some guidelines that I like a lot, but as I'm working on the details the guidelines get smudged out by my hand rubbing on the page, and after a while the guidelines have just completely disappeared. This makes it hard to maintain things like perspective lines for the background, proportions if I have to rework a part of the character, since all the setup work is just gone. Working digitally I won't have to worry about any of these issues. Also, being able to zoom in is a blessing. Drawing those comics has been a real struggle due to their small size. I'm working at 8.5 by 11 inches, which is a size I've heard some artists complain about being too small for an entire picture. Meanwhile I'm trying to shove a picture into 1/9th of that area sometimes, heh.

Conveniently, I can use the tablet as a second monitor as well, which has already come in handy for working on other projects.

I don't expect this to be any kind of 'silver bullet' for my drawing. I still have to transfer the lines onto paper when they're done if I plan on painting it, and I'm still going to be awful at inking traditionally, so it'll have it's fair share of issues. However, I suspect it'll make planning and drawing out pictures much easier. It's not going to make me a better artist by itself, but I do suspect it'll make me a more consistent artist, which will be nice.

Once I get the hang of it, that is. Using the screen tablet requires sitting in a completely different position than I'm used to and so I'm drawing using a different group of muscles in my arm. Going to take some practice before I can draw quickly or accurately. In the meantime, here's my first doodle ever using it! It's not great, it's my usual boring practice pose because I didn't want to be thinking about anatomy while also getting the hang of an entirely new drawing interface, but I hope some of you find it interesting none-the-less.