This is my last drawing of Diana for 29 Faces! Onwards and upwards.
I’ve been experimenting with digital painting during the last couple of days. Digital art is confusing, not least because of the terminology. You can take a photo of someone, throw a couple of filters on it and call it digital art. You can spend six hours in Photoshop collaging and blending layers and also call it digital art. You can use a graphics tablet and pen, start with a blank screen in Photoshop and draw, just like you would on any substrate and this too is digital art. Or more accurately digital painting. I do the Photoshop Artistry type of digital art a lot and have been for a couple of years. The last couple of days however I’ve been trying digital painting. I suck so hard at it. I was horrified with what appeared on the screen when I attempted my first portrait yesterday. Really? That bad? I expected a learning curve but seriously how can it be so different from paper and pencil? My first reaction was to give up. Then I had to give myself ‘the talk’. This is the talk I launch into when people within my hearing say they can’t draw a straight line and I tell them, of course they can. If they can hold a pencil and move it across paper they can draw, or rather they can learn to draw. Art is a funny business. We wouldn’t imagine that if we want to learn a new language we could pick up a book and be fluent in an hour. We wouldn’t pick up a musical instrument and expect to be playing 10 recognisable tunes by the end of the day. And yet we seem to do this with art, we try to paint a face, mess it up, say this is too hard and give up telling ourselves that we don’t have ‘natural talent’. Just don’t get me started on talent…that’s a whole other blog post. So my task today is to try and dismiss my internal critic and practice digital painting. I’ll let you know…
