Digitally Yours
In August 2019, inspired by Nathan W. Pyle’s seemingly overnight success, I decided I wanted to learn how to draw digitally but I didn’t really have the funds to buy anything crazy, especially when I didn’t know if I’d even like it. I ended up with a $350 (CAD) Samsung tablet and a bluetooth stylus that I think was around $30 (CAD). Since I already pay $42 (CAD) per month for Adobe Creative Cloud, I decided to start with the app Adobe Draw because it would play well with Illustrator and Photoshop, the latter of which I’m the most familiar with of the whole setup.
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”42″ gal_title=”Early Digital”]I kinda liked it in the beginning. I made some cute cartoons and some animals that my friends on Facebook thought were funny, but Adobe Draw and the bluetooth stylus both had limitations I never anticipated. With the stylus, it just wasn’t nearly as receptive as a traditional pen or pencil and it was difficult to get over the deficit. With Adobe Draw, you were limited to 11 layers and a specific number of pen strokes before the app would crash. I like to draw every blade of grass and crater on the moon so this was problematic for me.
Due to the aforementioned issues, having enough control over the stylus to draw my girls was impossible, so I was relegated to drawing rudimentary animals, mostly using simple shapes via brush preferences. I was okay with this because I had the brilliant idea that I was gonna use this new tool to make a web comic called “Budget Zoo”, based on the little zoo in my town, and inspired by Maude Lewis, a Canadian artist who painted the things around her small world of Nova Scotia. I thought it would be good immersion therapy for my agoraphobia to sit in a lounge chair at the zoo 5 minutes from my house and draw animals all summer…and it would have been if the limitations of the stylus and Adobe Draw didn’t eventually drive me insane and make me mad enough that I only managed to make three Budget Zoo comics. I gave up before summer even started and I didn’t go to the local zoo even once. *sad trombone*
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”43″ gal_title=”Budget Zoo”]My stint in the digital drawing world lasted approximately 14 weeks and the last thing I drew on the Samsung tablet was a picture of my dog, Lucky, after my dad died in September 2019.
In March/April 2020, just in time for quarantine, Blake bought a laptop, so I inherited his iPad, and then a friend sent me their old Apple Pencil. After watching a few tutorials on YouTube, I downloaded the Procreate app and started drawing. Procreate is fantastic! The number of layers you can have depends on the resolution and size of the image, so for a 3000 x 3000 pixel image at 300 dpi, you can have (I thiiiiiink?) 59 layers. FIFTY-NINE! Not 11 like Adobe Draw. If there’s a pen stroke limit to Procreate, I haven’t hit it yet, so I don’t think it exists.
The first thing I drew, a VW minibus, was pretty uninspired and I was disappointed, but as soon as I wrapped my head around the fact that the Apple Pencil was almost as responsive as an actual pencil, I realized that, in theory, I should be able to draw my girls with it. I got to work.
Being cherry blossom season, I wanted to draw a girl under a cherry blossom tree. I also knew that you can ANIMATE your drawings with Procreate, which intrigued me something fierce because my not-so-secret dream when I was a kid, was to be a Disney animator. Then when I found out that A) you had to go to college for at least 4 years, B) had to intern/apprentice for 2 more years after that (or more), and C) that you almost always had to be drawing someone else’s IP, I said “fuck that for sure” because that seemed like a bleak future to me. BUT! With Procreate, I could animate my own stuff from the comfort of my own couch and with enough practice, I could potentially get good at it! How exciting!
So I made the animated cherry blossoms gif above. As it turns out though, animating stuff is difficult and doing a good job is even more difficult, so, I haven’t really drawn anything else I had the urge to animate yet.
What I didn’t know about at this point was “colour profiles”, which means that the VW minibus and the cherry blossoms gif were optimized to be seen on a screen when they were created, not for print, so if I tried to print either one of them, the colours would be off. But they do look pretty spectacular on my iPad screen!…
One day, while I was playing a dumb phone game that’s primarily supported by ads, I saw an advertisement for a really cool digital planner subscription service that included all kinds of “digital stickers”. Intrigued, I looked into it and the subscription was $59.99 (USD) per year, which was too rich for my blood, so I started googling alternatives.
I came upon GoodNotes, which I think was a one-time $5 purchase, but I found it didn’t come with very many good stickers, so I started googling “cheap free digital stickers” and there was a tutorial on how to make your own. I watched it and couldn’t believe how easy it was! Even better was that there were women making a killing by selling these stickers on Etsy.
Needless to say, I spent the next week making digital stickers, with the idea of creating a menstrual themed sticker pack to sell on Etsy. I could never figure out how to make my own sticker sheets and actually “package” the product though, so the 100 or so stickers I made never saw the light of day outside of Patreon. 🙁
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”45″ gal_title=”Period Stickers”]Something I seem to keep coming back to with digital drawing is drawing real people and self portraits. For whatever reason, drawing digitally has me looking inward, whereas, for the most part, artistically speaking, I generally lean outward I think.
The third thing I ever drew on the iPad was me crocheting while Blake read a book on the porch. Blake is wearing his She Makes War band t-shirt that I meticulously freehand copied from one he actually owns, and he is drinking a glass of cabernet sauvignon while reading a romance novel. I am wearing a SunnyGrrrl t-shirt with black yoga pants and I am drinking a Diet Coke while crocheting a granny square for my “Dream Blanket”. My rose gold Pax 3 cannabis vaporizer is on the table beside us. The table matches the chairs you can barely see, which my mother painted for us in real life. The garbage can is my actual garbage can. On either side of us are lilac bushes because when I drew this, the lilac trees were in full bloom, despite the fact that this drawing was based on a day last fall when Blake and I were on the porch doing these exact things.
When I draw, digitally or manually, I usually draw some semblance of a body to know where the clothes are supposed to go. Drawing digitally, it’s easier because you don’t have to worry about erasing your lines and you can just put the clothes over top as a layer, so you can get a better “fit”. I realized that I had everything drawn for our naked bodies except the details when I was finished doing the regular edition of this piece, so I hid the clothing layer, added the details, and called the naked version the “Bare Oaks Edition”.
Oh, by the way, we’re naturists and we belong to a naturist club called Bare Oaks. Blake super likes being naked and being social amongst naked people and swimming and hot tubbing naked and being part of the community. I like feeling the sun on my skin after a long winter, swimming, and drawing outside naked in the spring and summer when there’s not a pandemic. They also made a really great burger there, which we eat on the patio, naked. We wouldn’t really crochet naked on our front porch at home because that would unfortunately be inappropriate, but we’ve casually discussed that it ~*might*~ be a neat thing to have a trailer at Bare Oaks when we retire and just hang out there during the warm months. There are an awful lot of bugs though and their internet sucks and we’d pretty much have to win the lottery to do it, so it’s just an idea. But that’s how “into it” we are.
Blake pointed out to me, about a month after I finished the drawing, that he does not have a bellybutton. He has an appendix scar, though. I’m not sure why I didn’t give him a bellybutton, I guess I just forgot. He was working when I was trying to draw his tattoos and when I asked him to take off his shirt while he was working so I could draw them, he gave me the “fuck off with your reindeer games” look so I had to go off of memory, which is a lot harder than I thought it’d be. The tattoos look like Blake’s, but they’re not even remotely accurate. The albatross across his neck is how he described to me the original idea for that tattoo, not the actual execution. He also has a lot more tattoos than I drew but that’s because it was too hard to draw so small. This was also the first time I ever played with opacity. Blake’s tattoos are of a lower opacity than they started out with to give them that faded ink look. I think they turned out well.
My body shows my 9 inch scar down my torso, which is mostly hidden by the granny square, and the scar I have on my throat from my tracheotomy.
The only thing that isn’t really factual about this drawing is the amount of eyeliner I wear on the porch, which is to say I generally wear none. I hadn’t yet perfected how to do my own eyeliner digitally and I was afraid it would look weird if I left my eyelids skin coloured. Now I think the eyeliner looks weird and I’m also not wearing glasses. Another unfactual thing is that our front door is – as of now – plain grey.
In 2015, Blake and I went to San Francisco for my birthday and my friend Kat, the woman who inspired me to become a camgirl in 2000, threw me the best birthday party I’ve ever had. The only one I’ve had as an adult, actually. She had a red velvet cake specially made just for me, with memes and phrases from my favourite camgirl all over it, and she cooked the most delicious chicken I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve been chasing the dragon ever since! She even mashed cauliflower! The dinner was fantastic. Even better, Kat invited 3 of my old school camgirl friends and their significant others: Sapphire, Steph The Geek, and Artfag. It was a glorious, old school camgirl reunion and one of the best nights of my life. Kat and the girls really made me feel special and loved. At some point in the night, the above photo was taken of all of us. I often look at that photo because I genuinely love these friends of mine and I like to think about that night.
One day, when I was looking for photos to use as reference photos, I came across the photo of the 5 of us and I started drawing. Drawing real people is hard because you are beholden to your subject. If you don’t create something flattering, the viewer interprets the depiction as intentionally “offensive” and you don’t want your subject to feel bad about themselves and how they’re portrayed. It has to be an honest depiction though also, so yes, I have to include Artfag’s lip ring and Steph & I have to have glasses, but I can’t make them too big or that will be interpreted as being comical. Same with noses, boobs and butts.
Because I am trying my best to give honest but flattering depictions of my friends, I decided to cover their “naked” bodies here for their own privacy. I don’t want them or anyone else to think I’m objectifying them or commenting on their bodies, even though they’re just cartoons and the details aren’t even filled in and aren’t going to be. Underneath those black boxes are just lumps of flesh coloured bodies and when the piece is done, they’ll be wearing the outfits they’re wearing in the photo so you won’t even see most of them. I mostly just didn’t want my friends to think I was creepily drawing them naked.
A few weeks ago, I re-evaluated my social media profiles and realized that I hadn’t updated my userpic/avatar on any of them in over 2 years. I didn’t feel like getting all dolled up and turning on lights to take a new one and god knows, no one’s going to parties or anything makeup worthy right now during the pandemic, so I decided to draw one instead. Another self portrait, this time wearing lipstick and proper eyeliner.
This was only my 3rd time ever putting glasses on one of my girls and while they’re not perfect, I think they’re better than the ones on me and Steph in “Camgirl Birthday”, so I’m gonna have to re-do those.
And finally, here’s the piece I finished last night, entitled “Weed Bath”. It’s a drawing of me in a weed bath bomb-infused bath with bubbles covering my bits and most of the water. I’m inexplicably wearing eyeliner and lipstick, and my hair is in a messy bun. On my “tub tray” is my Nintendo Switch Lite, an open Diet Coke with the French side facing the viewer so you know it’s potentially Canadian, and an unopened bottle of water. On the phone beside the tub, an audiobook, “A Mind Spread Out On The Ground” by Alicia Elliott, is playing. I’m holding a joint in my left hand, that was rolled with strawberry rolling papers to signify that I was enjoying cannabis in the tub, despite the fact I don’t smoke it in real life, I vape it. Unfortunately, there’s no universal image for weed that gets the point across better than a simple joint, blunt, or bong, so I didn’t draw my Pax vaporizer. Most people don’t know what a Pax is or how to recognize one.
Again in this piece, I played with layers and opacity, like I did with Blake’s tattoos in “Crocheting On The Porch With Blake”. The bubbles are 3 separate layers with 3 different opacities and they took me about 7 straight hours to draw. I was sore when they were finished but I think they turned out cool as hell! I’m very proud of them! My laptop screen is pure garbage so I can’t see some of the details I can see on the iPad. Hopefully they show up properly for you! (I will admit that I’m toying with animating this one with steamy weed leaves floating up around her head and shoulders….)
So there you have it, my digital art journey so far, from Samsung to iPad, all summed up in one very long post and tied with a bow. To get updates in shorter posts in your e-mail as they happen + exclusive printables, please check out my Patreon! To see works in progress in real time and chat with cool people, please join my Discord! Thanks for reading! Peace out, girl scouts!
