Learning digital drawing

During this lockdown I’ve been learning digital drawing. It has been for a good while that I wanted to dive into this area. I have started mixing media into my work but a deeper knowledge and practice are still in need!

Nowadays I use Affinity, which includes Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity publisher. Easy ‘conversation’ among these three softwares. I am learning to draw in Affinity designer where vector drawing is quite robust. For such I am following their workbook that is being quite helpful.

I spent 2 days to create this piece shown bellow that is from one of the projects in the book. It is called Whittler and is a hybrid vector and raster story created by Paolo Limoncelli. I have to say I was very chuffed when I saw my result, even though not perfect! :-). I started from scratch and I didn’t use any of the files provided to do my work on top of. They were used as references when I needed.

It started as a sketch using the pencil tool. Then with the pen tool with a fill I created the shapes that didn’t have to follow exactly my sketch. The drawing finished up with some raster textured, detailed brushes and vector brushes. Ultimately colour was adjusted. I finally got a grasp how to proceed when trying to do a drawing. Now I am really looking forward to allowing my own imagination to be transformed into drawings as by themselves or inserted into my photos.

Here you can watch how Paolo goes along with his atmospheric perspective for concept paintings. Affinity is producing a wonderful lockdown series that is really worthwhile to follow if you want to learn all we can do with their programs.