Dipping into Digital Paint

I feel lucky that I remember a time when every house didn’t have a computer and when life wasn’t dependent upon digital technology. I remember in primary school, being marched off to the ‘computer room’ once a week for some kind of lesson and high school invariably involved some Maths games of sorts in the designated computer room but I don’t remember being overly excited by the possibilities these machines promised and I have largely kept their use for practical applications in my work such as making edits in Photoshop or colour correcting files for print as well as the admin side of business.

An opportunity arose last year for me to work on a design for a greeting card for Earth Greetings. There was actually a design that we were working from that I had painted in gouache that we were re-imagining into a heart shape. There was no doubt that this was easy enough to do in Photoshop with a little cutting and pasting and tweaking but I didn’t feel like it was completely perfect and I was uneasy about cutting up and re-purposing the original painting in this way. With limited time before the card was to go to print, I didn’t think it would be possible to paint a new original and have it photographed in time so it led me to think about the possibility of using Procreate to finish this project.

And so began a crash course in understanding the tools and tricks to using this app on the i-Pad. I had only ever briefly played with the brushes and colours before but hadn’t really explored further or created anything near to a finished artwork. I am ever grateful to my You-Tube teachers who share their knowledge in easy-to-follow online tutorials (inparticular a shout out to Bardot Brush) that eliminate the frustrations associated with learning any unfamiliar software; before long I was happily ‘painting away’ with my digital pen. In the back of my mind, I knew I had the original gouache painting to fall back on so it was really just a case of giving it my best shot and seeing what we thought about the end result.

I think there is always the assumption that working digitally is somehow faster or easier(and I am sure this is reality for some experienced creators of digital content) but for me I found myself using the digital pen in quite a similar way to a normal paint brush and with the ability to zoom in on a work, there is potential to work on even smaller details. The advantages I found were of course the ability to ‘undo’ paint strokes, cut and paste parts, change colours as needed and work in layers which makes changing background colours a whole lot easier. It is also an advantage to be able to work from original hand drawn sketches imported into the app and then again be able to export the design back to Photoshop where I am more familiar with making final edits.

Heart of FLowers

This is the result from this very first project I completed and I am happy to report that this one was chosen for the print run so it felt like a very successful ‘experiment’. I have added Procreate to my list of tools that I will continue to use for the right projects. I am still very much in the ‘beginner’ phase of discovering all the possibilities that this digital painting style offers but I am enjoying the convenience of having a portable painting studio to take with me when I am out and about. On the down side, I need to remember to charge the apple pen and I have also found the apple pen to be not particularly ergonomic, so am looking at the various covers and grips to alleviate the discomfort of using this tool for more than an hour or two at a time.

I set myself another challenge to compete 3 more digital paintings this year. The very first, ‘Australian Native Flora’, I recently released as a limited-edition print and have just completed this second piece titled, Native Gems’. I have enjoyed seeing these new pieces come to life and the challenge of working with a different tool. I don’t think it will ever replace my love for painting with gouache but it is always good to try new things and work in different ways and I am looking forward to seeing where I can go with this process. I would love to know your thoughts on digital painting and what software or apps you have experimented with.