Thursday, August 29, 2013

Digital pencil

A while back I said I was going to do a whole children's book portfolio in a new digital pencil style. Wellllll, it takes me a while to get around to things sometimes, but I do, eventually.

Here is a new test piece, where I've partially copied an old piece that was done with black colored pencil. (I do have an old test piece I started in color a long time ago, which you can see here. Yes, I've had this idea in the works for a while!)


This first piece is the original in colored pencil.

 




And this is digital.



I'm working in layers. Here's how it looks with one of the layers 'turned off'.


I'm playing will ALL of the controls for brush and texture size, opacity, flow, 'jitter', some stuff I don't even understand - whatever there is in the control panels. I'm using Photoshop, a Wacom tablet and stylus, and am using the stylus just like I would a colored pencil, building up the values slowly. 

I think I feel confident enough now to start a whole NEW piece, and try this idea out and see how I do. 




3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm very intrigued by the whole idea of digital drawing. I've seen people do amazing things just on an ipad during open figure drawing sessions. I can only imagine whats possible with a professional tablet and programs like you're using. Please tell as much as you can about it Paula. I applaud your courage in jumping into this new trend and I really like how you did the drawing! It's a wonderful pencil drawing too, by the way!

Kelly Johnson said...

I follow Drawing a Fine Line via email, and then I jump over to your Blog. I love seeing the daily excursions, and learning along the way too. I love to draw/illustrate and I am thinking of getting a Wacom tablet. Question if I may; Are you starting "from scratch" drawing or did you scan in a rough draft of you image and go from there? Are you creating vector art or raster images, perhaps since you mentioned Photoshop? Love following, not a pro like you, however has desires to be. Thanks for sharing!

Paula Pertile said...

Thanks Ladies!

Kelly, I don't know how to reply to you off-blog, so I'll post here and hope you see it.

For this demo and test piece, I'm just copying over a piece that was already done. I made it a 'base layer' in Photoshop, made it lighter, then drew over it.
For new art I would have a drawing on a base layer (either drawn on paper and scanned in, or drawn on the computer), then 'fill-in' the texture in new layers over it.

This is all raster/Photoshop art. I think this is the only way to paint like this. Vector wouldn't work.

Hope that helps!