Digital Inks - Wilf Mulberry, take one

Getting the Adonit Jot Touch Pixelpoint stylus was one thing - learning to draw with it was whole thing entirely. As I have mentioned, I'm not a complete stranger to digital drawing tools, having had a small Vacom pad back in the day when Macs still had their own interface for peripherals. But even then I did not even dream of actually drawing with it, at least for anything like line art. One of the reasons was simply that I liked - and still do - the tactile feel of using a real ink pen on paper, and those early Vacoms just could not offer that kind of precision and feedback I wanted. It had it's uses in colouring the illustrations, sure, but I never took the steps required to take it any further.

With Procreate, I decided to give the digital drawing another shot. Even though I mostly do stuff just to amuse myself these days, more often than not I end up using my drawings in one digital format or another, so getting there as soon as possible just makes sense. Well, okay, I also thought that I was perhaps a bit behind the times. Can't have that, now, can I?

The sketch layer if in light blue.
This way, I found it was easier
to tell the sketch apart from the inks.

So there I was, sitting with a stylus in hand, trying to find the courage to begin. 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons had rekindled my interest in RPGs, so I thought that the most natural thing for me to get my feet wet was to draw a character portrait. I had made a quick sketch of a Gnome investigator, Wilf Mulberry, scanned it and imported it to the iPad. Then, using the stylus just as I would a regular ink pen, I started to draw the ink lines.

Pretty soon I realized that although drawing with stylus was kind of similar to traditional drawing, it still was a totally different tool and would take some time to master. The first hurdle was to was to customize a brush that would function somewhat similarly to the ink pens I'm used to. I also noticed that unlike pen and paper, fast strokes are easier to make and trace much more smoothly that slow, long ones. This is something I have found hard to adjust to, as it is quite counterintuitive to me.

Also, at times when I change drawing angle or orientation of the pad, new lines after that may be a couple of millimeters off. Since this happens also when I'm using my finger, this might be a limitation in the iPad itself, or might have something to do with the screen protector I've applied. It's annoying, but not a dealbreaker, especially as it is so easy to undo any 'wrong' lines. Too easy, in fact. I'm a bit worried that I grow too accustomed to 'editing' the lines. That's one thing I like about traditional inks, every line you make is a commitment.

These are, however, just minor niggles. Although the first drawing was a bit rough, it was still manageable and most importantly, ended up looking like something drawn by me. Inking in Procreate does take some adjustments to my regular style, but for example the fact that I need to learn to make more faster and decisive lines is something that will likely improve my style and workmanship on the whole. I also noticed that I might need to make my initial pencil sketches a bit more accurately than previously, so that I don't have to guess and redraw so much during the inking. The whole process was perhaps not as smooth as I would have hoped for, but neither was it discouraging, and I'm pretty sure this will not be the last time I'll dabble with digital inks.