So I’ve been having some fun the last few days. I finally got myself Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, and Astral Chain and have been playing the hell out of each. Pretty great, to be honest. Best of all, though, I might have, maybe, possibly, gotten a drawing pad and downloaded some art software. Between that and the games, stopping to, y’know, sleep or eat has been tricky.
 
In all seriousness, It’s so freakin’ cool! As expected, there’s some adjusting to be done, though. A nice tip I heard for getting a feel for drawing digital coming from traditional is to actually trace over images you’ve already drawn traditionally. I’d say it helped me get settled in pretty well; I just went with my Spitfire pic since it’s straightforward enough but also would provide a good variety of shapes and curves for practice. Of course, as you can see, a lot of my lines are still wobbly, but they were made a good bit smoother using the correction tool. The tool seems to be called something different depending on the program you’re using, but nearly every program I’ve seen has it in some form. It’s a godsend if you’ve got naturally unsteady hands like yours truly, so I’d definitely recommend you try adjusting it when starting out. All in all, doing the line work was great and actually helped me better notice flaws in my original lines on paper.
 
Once I had traced the lines in their entirety and made some tweaks, I wanted to try coloring it. That definitely eliminated a big headache in rummaging through my pencil box and hoping I could find the desired colors. That led to me saying screw it, I wanna try my hand at blending and messing around with different brushes. Different experienced artists prefer different brushes and tools for blending, but I found basically using the smudge brush to actually blend colors and then touching up with the watercolor brush gave me the most pleasant results. Next thing you know, we got this. Looks pretty mediocre at best, of course, since I’ve never done blending before. My main gripes are all around the head and chest; I feel like I could’ve gone with lighter colors and made the blend a little cleaner with time, but it’ll work for now. Could’ve spent hours making all sorts of adjustments, but I figured it wasn’t worth it right now.
 
I really love how much more dimension the image has now, though. It’s a step up from the monochrome rough line work or messy coloring I was doing on paper. I also remembered that I never colored this drawing before, so I thought I might as well share this so ya’ll can see the difference. Was so fun, I’m actually tempted to do the same for one or two of my other other pics just for gits and shigs. More practice is always good, and getting comfortable with my lines and blending is going to require that more than anything.
 
If you’re curious what “equipment” I went with, my tablet is a Huion Inspiroy WH1409 V2 which I drew with in Medibang Paint Pro. Both are pretty easy to setup and use; the tablet driver is quick to install while the tablet itself should run you about $180, so not horribly expensive if you’re just starting out. Medibang is totally free, so that should be great if you’re on a budget as well. I personally still plan on trying out more programs since there are many different options available for free, but Medibang is certainly an easy one to start on if you wish. Only issue I’ve had so far is trying to change my canvas color after it was made transparent when adding a layer. Not sure why it did that in the first place or how to fix it, but I suppose it’s a relatively minor issue for the time being.