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If the paint is digital, can it still be wet? by Winter Darbey


The closest medium to digital painting that I've experienced in traditional art media is acrylic and oil paints. You can mix any color, paint over any other color with it, and layer them in different thicknesses with water. But in the digital world, the paint is always as wet or dry as you need it to be. You don't have to wait weeks for it to dry, making the place smell like turpentine, or be stuck with something because it dried too quickly. If you decide something was a mistake, you can instantly remove just that bit of paint and the paint underneath reappears untouched. Or, if you're a graphite artist like me, your painstakingly toned and detailed graphite work is never smudged away after hours of work by a careless palm. But layers are by far the best part. You can paint backgrounds and characters and details all entirely separate from each other, reworking each one, then merge them together and work on it like it was wet oil paint.


Pardon my enthusiasm. I didn't see you there. But I've only just recently delved into the world of digital art after using traditional tools for most of my life. So, I'd like to talk about my experience exploring it, using three pieces that were created or finished along the way.


These three images I've released so far with RCN Media (link) have different levels of traditional and digital techniques used on them.



The Mushroom Goddess image is almost entirely traditional. For most of the mushrooms, I did quick pencil studies individually before deciding which ones would hold which roles in the overall arrangement. There are many local Island mushrooms, most of them real despite their fabulous and strange appearances (with artistic liberties taken). Long, slimy elegant stinkhorns poke out hopefully. Coral fungi twine and enshrine like their undersea counterparts. The aptly named bleeding tooth fungus (lower right) is just as strange in real life. It has a strange toothy texture instead of gills, and it squeezes round, vivid drops of red from a pale white surface. Bears-tooth, gallerinas, morels, false morels, puffballs, and birds-nest fungi all surround the Goddess and contribute their spores to her brief and powerful manifestation.


The Goddess design also went through some iterations before I settled on the traditional iconic, simplified design. I wanted her to look like an entity not truly seen, but perceived; she is, after all, briefly existing in the maelstrom of unified energies. She wouldn't have time to manifest fingers.



The only digital thing used for the Mushroom Goddess image was to invert it from black and white to white and black. The version that I have here on RCN, available for prints, looks much more like an underwater scene, which is the vibe I wanted to embellish. The original was drawn in pencil, then inked, then erased, then shaded with pencil again.


The second image, Serotonin, was more simple, fun, and more of a combination. The brain itself, and its plugged-in wetware upgrade, was drawn with a regular pen. I was stumped for ideas and playing around with various ink drawings I had from my sketchbooks. At this point, it was a traditional sketch I had loaded into my digital toolset. Then I drew a very loose, squiggly glow of sci-fi electric fire around it in digital — and loved it. From there I decided to make it about a neurotransmitter. I chose Serotonin. For a while, I struggled trying to overlay an accurate diagram of serotonin pathways over top of my brain drawing — but they were at different angles, and it wasn't working. I switched to the serotonin molecule and had a lot of fun making it look like neon and casting its glow on the wet blue brain, using the soft and vivid color changes that digital allows more easily. Then I ended up symbolizing the serotonin pathways to something less accurate but far more readable and added it as a glyph to accompany the molecule. Digitally yoinking the pathway glyph off the brain and up above the molecule, without having to paint white over all that linework just to salvage the original brain, was very satisfying.



The final image, Unchained, came after days spent working on false starts. I had wasted hours upon hours going nowhere slowly and had just picked up my sketchbook for inspiration. A true workhorse of a sketchbook, this was not the kind that you show to people with beautiful, finished images in it. This was a stained, thick beast, with a hundred thin, grainy pages in it and a spill that had affected most of the pages. And there were my sketches, the process of finding and refining poses that I had made for a piece I intended to contribute to the upcoming art show.








Here was what I needed: an idea that was simple and readable. An idea that expressed feminine power, which was one of my main criteria for my follow-up art piece after people had connected so well with my Mushroom Goddess image. And it had to do it in a genuine way and really embody that defiance, that joy, that I wanted to capture. This sketch was perfect for that.



I set to work digitally. First, I went over the sketch in digital ink, flipping the canvas frequently to check on proportions and overall 'look'. The core was fine, but many parts needed fiddling and fine tuning further than the original sketch, which in itself took many hours of adjusting and redrawing and fiddling. I took many pictures of my own hands to figure out how hers should look. The close hand took form fairly easily in the initial sketch, but the fist here is about the 12th fist I drew for her. Such is the power of pencil or digital sketches: they allow you to rework one part without needing to redraw the entire image to try again. Even in ink, that most indelible and irreversible of mediums, there is white ink and gesso. I also thought about the idea of having her covered in tattoos, but in the end I decided that I wanted the whole thing to be more simple and clearly readable.


In the end, I did entirely new and different things with Unchained that would have been impossible in traditional — I made the flag colour scheme into a glow that ensured the linework would be emphasized even on a black background. I shaded her with a different layer for every shadow type and erased them as needed without touching the linework. I tried dozens of colours for her hair, chains, and backdrop without having to repaint a single line. I made a custom gradient tool and made the canvas bigger around the character instead of trying to... I mean, what would you do in traditional? Glue more paper on? Sew more canvas on? Or simply have to redo the entire image from scratch when you realized it?



And yet... in order to get started, the true spark was that pencil sketch that came at the end of a dozen or more sketches, all in pursuit of how to express my idea with form.


I look forward to seeing all the exciting new ways I can bring my visions to life with the combined power of traditional and digital mediums! See you in the next blog post.



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