Floral Tails Series & A Comparison

It’s been forever since I last posted something.

Some days ago I got my long awaited gifts from my husband, an IPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. I had been wanting to try digital art for quite some time and now I am finally able to give it a shot! I have been working on my IPad and with my Apple Pencil to create stuff these days. It is really fun. I might write a review on the products and show you guys some of the drawing apps I use. We will see.

One thing I had in mind before having these new tools was to recreate the same, or say similar art piece I did to see if there is huge a differen between digital and traditional way of drawing. Therefore I decided to add a new piece to my Floral Tails Series. My old way of doing this series was to first do a draft on a piece of paper and then use ink pen to dot my subject. After a huge amount of time working on dotting I would scan the final piece and upload the work. If I wanted to colour a piece I would do it in the post production and use Photoshop.  The most scary process was inking because it was black ink on white papers and you can not undo a mistake.

This experimental piece was a combination of a fighter fish and the flower camellias, one of my favourite flowers. Before I break down the difference between my old ways of inking and the new one let’s see some pictures first. The following pieces were done in the old way.

 

Floral Tails Series 01

 

Floral Tails Series 02

Floral Series 03

Floral Tails Series 04

 

 

Floral Tails Series 05

 

Floral Tails Series 06

Floral Tails Series 07

Floral Tails Series 08

 

Now let’s take a look at the piece done using IPad and Apple Pencil with the drawing app Procreate. This is a screenshot of the progress.

 

And this is the final piece.

Floral Tails Series 09

 

Here is a detailed picture of the camellia I drew.

 

I created a brush specifically for inking. I wanted the image look like it’s done in the old fashion. I think it was a success. The biggest different between using a real ink pen and digital drawing is really the “undo” part. When it’s digital it’s always more relieving and easy to make changes and sometimes mistakes because you know you can always fix them. Also the quality of the image improves. Before I had to scan an art piece and there was always a slight difference in colour or exposure. I sometimes had to add a colour filter to cover up the imperfection even though I wanted the image to be in black and white. However in digital drawing such problems don’t exist.

Now here comes the issue with digital drawing. The fact that you can have a digital canvas in super high resolution is a problem for me. Sometimes I would draw way too detailed and lost my focus. Since you can zoom in to draw one pixel at a time, it is really difficult to let go of those empty space you see when the image is zoomed in. However if I did that my work would be lost in details that even eyes can’t see. Subsequently the beauty of inking and dotting style would also be lost. When I overworked a petal it looked good zoomed in but once I put the image back to its normal size the inking style disappeared and it only created a black and white gradient effect. Gladly this problem can be solved by practice more and always remind myself to see the bigger picture.

The old way of drawing and digital drawing has one thing in common and that is the time I need to finish a piece. It still takes ages!!! I hope you enjoy this post and let me know what do you think about it. Which ways of drawing you prefer or you think they all have their pros and cons? 😊