Sketch Diary: Lilac haired digital portrait

I'm late to the Clip Studio party... but man is it sweet. The drawing above was a quick sketch that turned into playing with a bunch of settings and such. It's far from perfect hah but it was really fast and fun. I'm excited to spend less time rendering and more time just drawing and painting digitally. But if you want to see something wild... See the image below! A similar colored drawing that I scanned and then colored probably using the original Photoshop back in 2002. 

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Sword fighter digital sketch

I've been neglecting to upload any of the digital work I've been doing so here's one. I'm not a seasoned warrior of the pen tablet... but I like using it. It's nice not having to worry about smearing the graphite with the side of your hand. Or accidentally bunching or ripping the paper. I think paper will always be my go-to but watch me 50 years from now be all 'Paper is the devil! Digital art or die!'. Who knows.

Oh hey, you can watch me draw here:
5x speed

1x speed

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Posture warmup ladies

Another midnight sketch when I couldn't get to sleep and needed some creative activity to settle my mind. Slowly getting more comfortable with the new Wacom settings. I think I'll need to search from some good brushes though, something like oil and watercolor and such. I'm a blender. I like soft pastels and watercolor and copic markers because of the blending ability.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Star girl digital

So along with traveling a bunch this summer, I ended up totally cutting myself off from my desktop computer without really noticing. It was pretty weird. I think I was just really burned out digitally. I ended up spending a ton of time cleaning out my material stuffs, cleaning in general, gardening, and trying to spend time each day on myself (meditation type stuffs).

Can you see that in the sketch? I'm tired of being stiff and uncomfortable both physically and emotionally. Feels like all this time spent on myself is paying off. Unfortunately, all that meditation did NOT include drawing of any kind so I barely drew anything this summer. But I'm excited to get back into being creative everyday. Or at least creative in a drawing kind of way. I still think downsizing and reorganizing my kitchen cabinets requires its own creativity haha.

So to the universe I say - take time for yourself. It may seem like a lot of work to slow down and calm your mind but trust me it will pay off.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Playing with color in a portrait

My second quickie sketch with the new Wacom. Playing with some colors and shading but ultimately, I got frustrated because I don't understand how to adjust the brushes and levels how I want yet to get the effect that I want. Basically, I want to paint watercolor or copic markers digitally.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Girl sitting and new Wacom

NEW WACOM AAAAAAAH! After so many years with my trusty Intuous 2 Wacom, I was gifted a glorious Wacom Pro for my 11 year anniversary with Joel. He knows the way to my heart... hah! Well this was the first sketch on the new Wacom. The sensitive takes some getting used to, I keep turning it up and down and messing with the hardness and opacity levels etc. But I'll figure it out. I was surprised I didn't goof up the proportions more in this, honestly. I was having the darnedest time zooming in and out all the time. But I found myself sticking around 100% zoom for the most part.

Joel was cute though - he says 'Nice!... No color?' and this was after me having like 2 hours with the new Wacom and I was like 'DUDE do you know how long it can take to color stuff!? It took me over an hour just to do the rough sketch lol'. I think he was misled cuz he's seen me do copic or watercolor drawings that take like 30 minutes to an hour (simple portraits) and assumed it was the same. Maybe for the pros who know all the tricks and have their hot keys and such setup in just the right way. But me? I gotta relearn how to use layers even hah. But I'm excited to do so.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Fred's Voice portrait

Second quicky sketch with the Krita paint program. Tis glorious. The paint program, not the sketch haha. The sketch is fine. I was trying to do something.... else with that chin angle, didn't quite work out so I just went with it. Sometimes I find myself having conversations with my drawings. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted to be facing forward, not tilted to the left? My bad. I didn't realize you felt so strongly about it.' Hence his shady side eye. So much shade.

This was sketched while listening/watching to a Fred's Voice ASMR video on the youtubes. Specifically the 'rude English gentleman' bits. Cracks me up.  But of course, it also relaxes me. If you've never tried ASMR, I highly recommend it. For me, it's a cross been meditation and a brain massage. I have a strong response to it, though. I get all tingly. Not everyone does. And not everyone responds well to intimate personal attention either, I recently found out. And that's ok. There's always cute cat videos. Bless the internet and all it's glory.

Fred, if you're seeing this, thanks for the great videos. Keep up the great work for as long as it is fulfilling for you.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Big hair, big lips, and first go with Krita

OH YEAH. Now we're talking. Finally found a painting program that actually works with my super old Wacom tablet, Intuous 2. I had just about given up and was looking to buy a new drawing tablet this year because I miss painting digitally. Thankfully, another artsy friend (Nathalie) introduced me to Krita, a wonderful FREE paint program.

Krita appears to be open source and already, for me, has far surpassed Gimp. I never got the hang of Gimp, too many things were different from Photoshop and I had grown up on photoshop, I even use it in my career so it's a daily thing for me. But I don't really like Photoshop for painting. I like things like Open Canvas and Sai much more. So when I upgraded to Windows 7 and the sensitivity stopped working for my Wacom pen, I thought all was lost.

For some crazy reason, Krita works and works really well. To do the sketch above, all I did was install the program, open a new document, didn't change any settings or preferences, and sat down for 15 minutes. This is just the basic brushes setting so I CAN NOT WAIT to try the specialty brushes. After my 15 minute doodle, I immediately went back to the download page for Krita and made a donation because hot damn, this program is nice.

After I spend some more time with it, I'll do a more in depth review of Krita. I have high hopes. Have you tried it yet? What were your thoughts on it? What's your fav paint program?

Nathalie and I are hoping to figure out how to do co-op painting via Krita but if that's not a thing, I hope the developers can figure that out because this will be the perfect program for that. Also, live stream painting? I think it already has a record feature but not sure how good it is yet.

with love - M