Hey all!

Apologies for not posting yesterday, it was a pretty busy weekend, and I reached my capacity rather quickly each day. It might also have to do with the fact that we are weaning ourselves off coffee, sugar, and sodium, while increasing our exercise… maybe. We are officially off coffee after a 10-day weaning, woohoo! Now to keep up the sugar & sodium reduction and the exercise increase.

Somehow even with the slower brain I was able to create some cool stuff… let’s take a look, shall we?

brushes

I’m still working my way thru the default brushes from Procreate’s big update… I’ve done the Inks…

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One of my Art Nest friends is really liking these beans, and now I’m thinking I should gather them together, possibly color them in, and then make a sticker sheet.

Workshop

On Saturday we had our first Procreate Bootcamp Workshop… we drew a Valentine’s collection. Even though I’ve been doing digital art for years, I still learned like 3 things in class!

copy cat

Last Thursday we had a Deep Dive discussion at our monthly Art Nest live online get together. We discussed feeling like a copy cat when you do art. In general when I create art I pull from several sources and then try to add my own twist. But when I do a draw-along tutorial… that’s when I start to wonder, at what point does this feel like mine and not the instructor’s? So I worked on figuring that out for me over the weekend.

I thought about what would I put in a Valentine’s collection, for me, I would have chosen Daisies instead of Roses, and I wasn’t real happy with my perfume and bow, so I decided to do a box of chocolates, also I didn’t like my stamp – so I changed it to an envelope. Also I wanted to look at reference for the typewriter. This was my first attempt…

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Better, but I still had that nagging feeling that it wasn’t mine yet. I put these up in the Art Nest forum and we had a bit of a discussion. First, I realized that I was comparing myself to myself, once I looked at Peggy’s work again.

Here’s Peggy’s art from a screenshot of class:

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But also I realized that I hadn’t gone far enough with the art. My style, I believe, is more cartoony with outlines, shadows and highlights. So I continued to work on the piece until it felt like me…

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I’m going to sit on this a little while and then possibly make a sticker sheet and a repeating pattern. But I want to walk away for awhile so that I come back to it with fresh eyes. Besides, I have like 10 months before anyone wants Valentines stuff again, right?. Heehee.

Beans

At the beginning of class when Peggy was going over stuff I already knew for those new to Procreate, I grabbed one of the default pens, Lifey, and altered it slightly to make it a bit more rough around the edges and then drew this cutie little Bean…

blobs

And now I’m working on Funwork for Saturday’s class, blobs. I decided to combine a few ideas… I’m still working thru the default brushes, so I made bean blobs with the Paints brushes. Now I’m practicing expressions on the various beans… this is what I have so far…

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Somehow I’m already behind at Procreate Bootcamp, heh. We received our first prompt on Monday and I haven’t started it yet. And we get another prompt tomorrow! I’d better get to it! See you tomorrow?

Until next time…

~nic