This is my first blog post in a very long time. Thankfully, I have long since graduated and my schedule is much more stable now, so I will definitely be able to write much more often now!
Having a nice, shiny new site definitely doesn’t hurt either! Squarespace is honestly so much easier to maintain and make changes to than my old Wordpress site! But then again, maybe that’s just because I don’t have much patience for web design. I definitely don’t mind spending hours making sure my site looks great and that I’m happy with my pages, but I don’t want to be spending half of that time trying to figure out how to make the site do what I want it to. Hooray for Squarespace’s ease of use! (I promise this is not a sponsored post or anything like that!)
For the last couple of months I’ve turned to digital art again as I felt kind of bad for neglecting my iPad Pro for a bit in favor of watercolor and gouache. It was also becoming kind of hard trying to find time, space, and patience for watercolors as I would have to get water, set up all my colors, wait for layers to dry before being able to move on to more layers or being able to close my sketchbook for the day, etc. Especially when I have a very curious cat who is very attached to me and anything I’m doing and has already stuck her paw in my watercolor/gouache palettes once or twice.
I have already gone through something similar at the end of my senior year of college, although that was more out of necessity and less out of convenience. I needed some more digital art pieces to add to my Portfolio, which was at the time, VASTLY traditional media.
I completely forgot just how convenient it is to do traditional art, especially on my iPad Pro, which I didn’t have when I was in school. I was working on a Cintiq 13 Pro, and while that fit into my bag with my laptop, I would hesitate to call it portable. I was still confined to a desk to be able to work, but I could at least move between classrooms, the library, and my student job with ease. I have since sold my Cintiq, simply because I am able to use my iPad Pro for everything that I would have needed my Cintiq for, all the while taking up much less room.
Today I purchased 5 different brush packs for Procreate from Frankentoon, which you can find here. I have honestly been sketching with them for the last 5 hours, and it’s been such a blast! Here is a quick 10 minute sketch I have done with the “Sunday strip” brush from the Squid Brush Pack.
I actually really like all of the “gaps” in the brush; normally I try to avoid brushes that do that and this brush has completely changed my mind!
Another app that I absolutely love to use on my iPad Pro to draw on is Adobe Illustrator Draw. I love using Adobe Illustrator and working with vectors so being able to draw vectors with my Apple Pencil is really amazing! I actually just submitted a design for a Panera Gift Card in a contest they’re having and I created it with Adobe Draw.
I love croissants the feeling of working in coffee shops so I wanted to utilize that love into the design.
I do have a couple more ideas for other designs so I may enter more into the contest as there is no limit to the number of entries you can have.
Anyway, I know a lot of this reads like an ad but I swear none of this is sponsored in any way; I’m just really enjoying my new website and drawing on my iPad Pro again.
Thanks for reading this, and I’ll talk to you again soon!