Back in mid-August 2020, I decided I wanted to learn to draw. I got myself a Wacom pad and a subscription to Clip Studio Paint, downloaded a few courses on Udemy and watched a bunch of youtube tutorials, and just… started to draw.
I’ve learned a lot. Mostly I’ve learned how much I don’t know, how much I can’t even evaluate the level of my own work, and that I will never get ‘good’, but I will get better.
I’ve made other posts sharing some of the pieces I’ve done, so I’m not going to share them all. Just the most recent ones.
I got a D in the one art class I took in high school because I was too busy reading fantasy novels to do my assignments, and since then I’d only really doodled in the margins of notebooks in the pen-and-paper realm. I’d never done any sort of digital art before. This is the first thing I drew on my Wacom pad, and I did it as a deliberate ‘baseline’ to track my skill progress. I was super proud of this when I first did it.
Ah, wee lamb that I was. Sweet summer child. All of that.
I’ve learned a LOT about linework, about coloring and layers and vector layers and the ways that digital art is not pen-and-paper art. Here’s my most recent finished piece:
So, still a LONG way to go, but… not bad for six (somewhat inconsistent) months of self-directed learning?
Here are some of the other things I’ve done since the last time I posted my progress update:
I still use the blend and blur functions like waaaaaaaaay too much. I need to get more comfortable with hard edges. You can see me trying to do that in the Liu Qingge drawing.
Anyways, that’s my 6-month progress report! I have a deviantart account where I’m much better about uploading things in a timely fashion. Feel free to follow me there.
Alyc Helms 