Digital Drawing (Digital Media)

There are seemingly unlimited ways to create digital art.  As I have been creating digital art on my own before the course began, I have my own methods and styles and on top of that, I'm aware of a vast number of techniques.  I have friends who have created art works by writing code, with no analogue creative input whatsoever.  And even then, digital art isn't just limited to visual elements.  Sound can be created digitally, film and animation. there really is no end to the routes one can take to create art with digital means.

That being said, there are elements that I consider to be more 'traditional' within the digital art medium.  This is my personal opinion, so this might not be the majority opinion, but I feel that traditional digital art is visual art that's created digitally, using an analogue input.  What I mean by this is that the digital aspects are created by a Human hand in some way.  Be that with a graphics tablet, or even a mouse, I believe there needs to be a Human controlled creation element.  For this, the images are created using digital imaging software, most notably Photoshop. 

When it comes to my own work, I using a Cintiq 13HD drawing tablet by Wacom, which is attached to my laptop.  For software, I use Photoshop for some things, but more often than not, I use a program called Clip Studio, which I personally feel gives me more control with the actual drawing element.  To better understand how I do my digital art, I took a closer look at my own process.

The above is a stage by stage development of my Personal project.  I really wanted to highlight how similar the process is to digital art.  As I would with a normal drawing, I would sketch out a pose using geometric shapes, trying to get the proportions and sizes right.  On top of that, I would then doodle some details and body mass, get a sketch done.  Now, as you can see, on the second version of this, the first version is gone completely.  The beauty of digital art is that you can draw on a 'clean sheet of paper' on top of the old one, whilst still clearly able to see the page below.  It sort of works like a lightbox.  So the sketch is drawn on top of the structure shape, but the structure shape can be removed completely.

The third stage is what I can lineart.  Again, this is similar to what I would do in traditional art, as I would take a pen or fineliner and ink the sketch.  This is what this stage is.  It cleans up the sketch and gives the lines a cleaner, more defined look.  It's worth noting that for this drawing, to keep the lines softer (because it was the look I was going for) I was using a Pencil (by digital standards) and layering it more and more to make it darker in the selected areas.

The fourth stage is where the process deviates from traditional methods.  If this was a traditional piece, and I was painting it or using markers, I'd include the shading in my colouring.  I'd start on the light tones and build up to the shadows.  But with digital, you fill in your flat colours, without shading.  The beauty of this is that these colours will remain intact, and the lighting elements can be adjusted and altered to create different lighting moods or styles.

The next stages can seem a little harder to tell apart.  The top left was soft, subtle shading in dark areas, which helps to create form and shape.  The top right is where things get a little more detailed.  I use a finer, heavier shading to highlight areas of shadows, such as crevices of clothes, hair details, for example.  Anywhere where the shadow bunches up and is heavier.  The third version is similar, except with the light.  I use a soft brush to add highlights of light.  And finally, the last one adds ambient lighting.  You can see a pinkish hue coming in from the left which helps the image blend into the environment.

It's worth mentioning that I separated this figure from the drawing, so at the same time, I was working on the background along with it, as well as some other minor details that I wanted the image to have.  The image took me around 30 hours to complete, and I really tried my best to get this to a high standard, and wanted to ensure that it was a good example of my technical ability.  The final version of this image was printed off and displayed at our class exhibition.

This was the final version of the piece.  I was really happy with this.  There were a few changes I would make to it now that it's finished.  As I mentioned earlier, this deviates a little from my normal style for two major reasons.  The first that I mentioned was that I used a pencil for the line art, instead of a pen.  My lines are usually thicker and more solid.  The second is the shading.  More often than not, I use a cleaner, more graphic style of shading called cell shading, which is often used for cartoons.  I used this style when working on this characters reference sheet below, to give a better example of what I mean.

I felt it was important to understand how I viewed digital art, and my preconceived notions of what it was and how to do it.  Whilst I appreciate that these methods are not solely digital art, I do have a hard time considering things like printing and reproduction to be part of the art process itself.  I admit that the digital elements have made art more accessible and easy to reproduce, but to me that's more part of the distribution than the creation.

I've always felt that digital art is like the computer is the pen or pencil or brush, that a person is using to create something.