I've been experimenting with digital art in the first few weeks of this year. I already have some skills in this area and use Adobe's Creative Suite frequently in my work and photography, but it was fun to try to improve my skills and play with some ideas.
While I love working with traditional art materials, digital art has some definite advantages:
The Undo Button!! (especially when I mostly work in watercolour and things can go very wrong very quickly, completely ruining what was otherwise a promising piece). In general, it's much easier to make adjustments to digital art compared to most traditional art mediums.
It's easier to work on a piece in small chunks, here and there as time allows. With watercolour painting, you can't really stop once you've started and the paper is wet, except for time needed for things to dry between layers.
With my touchscreen laptop and stylus, I can work pretty much anywhere, including while sitting on the couch! With traditional art forms, I usually need to be sitting at my drafting table, with all my materials at hand.
It's easier to get digital art on to my website, social media and to clients as there is no extra step to carefully photograph and then make adjustments on screen so that it actually looks something like the original artwork.
Some of the disadvantages:
You need a pretty high powered computer and access to some pricey software (although these are things I already need for my contract work).
Some pretty ginormous files can result from digital art and it fills up hard drive space FAST!
Here is a whimsical painting of slightly annoyed redpolls. This is the look they give me while I'm filling up their niger seed feeder and they have to wait for their food! I wanted to captured their puffed-up look and the colours of the extreme cold we had over Christmas/New Year. The hundreds of redpolls at our feeders sure brightened up the cold weather.
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