Playing with Digital

Lately, I’ve been playing around with my iPad and Apple Pencil and an app called ProCreate. Usually I sketch out ideas in my sketchbook with pencil or pen. I’ve found that I have more liberty and freedom when I create digital sketches. Why? I can move and reposition my sketches, use the pressure of my Pencil to vary the lines, change the colors on a dime, and more.

These are a couple of my early sketches and if you’re interested in seeing some of my more recent sketches for painting ideas, keep scrolling.

This is a sketch I created before I painted “Red, White, and Blue” and then I decided to try it with a different background with the historic bronc chutes.

Since I was so easily update a sketch, especially since I can work in layers and hide the layers to figure out what will make the best painting. My digital drawing has helped me design and create compositions for my watercolors. Doing value studies and having the freedom of digitally sketching has been helping me, especially since my collection of filled sketchbooks fills a shelf and hasn’t grown, instead my photo album in my iPad has grown with ideas for paintings.

Here’s another sketch that I’ve created for an idea of a Christmas card. I thought it would be fun to include my two dogs, Kona and Coal. Kona loves to snuggle, so of course she has a scarf which must have been the snowman’s. And Coal loves to grab sticks and run around with them, so unfortunately the snowman lost his arm to the playful boy. Being able to digitally sketch it out really helped with positioning the pups and then deciding on the limited color palette. I’m excited to create this little painting for this year’s Christmas card.

And this one, is more of a value study for a night scene that I’ve been wanting to paint for a long time. One of the biggest things is figuring out the directionality of the light source, the campfire. I might even play around with a second light source, the moon. That’s the beauty of playing around with digital sketches, I can duplicate this and play around with other compositions, lights, and shadows.

You the tools that help you. Sketching on my iPad is a tool that works well for me. Digitally drawing lets me create without starting all over again and being more productive.