Trying Digital Art

If you asked me what my number one favorite movie or song was, I would have no idea, because my opinion would change based on what I’ve seen or heard recently, and how I’m feeling that day. But my consistent number one favorite Instagram artist is Yuumei – my friend Iris showed me her account a few years ago and I love everything about her art style.

A lot of her art is digital and I wanted to try drawing something in her style since she uploads some time-lapse videos of her drawing. But I didn’t really know where to start? So I never got around to it.

Iris does digital art too though, so I finally asked her about it and she recommended I use the free app MediBang.

To be very honest, this initially looked very professional and slightly intimidating.

I just downloaded it on my phone since I don’t have a drawing tablet or anything like that. At first I was honestly so confused and just clicked on everything because I didn’t know what the icons did, but I found a bunch of basic MediBang tutorials online, and tried out some of the features, which led me to this:

So many brushes!!

I thought the gradient feature in the background was pretty cool.

After experimenting with it a bit, I decided to just go for it and try to draw something simple, that wouldn’t take very much time. As you can see, I chose flowers.

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The process! ^^

I started with the pencil brush tool (the default one I think) to draw the sketch. I also used the pencil tool to put down the base colors for the flowers and leaves. Afterwards, I switched to the watercolor brush and kept layering colors to get the more detailed shading. To me, it was easiest to make the opacity really low for the watercolor so I could layer a lot of different colors to make the blending more even. I also really like that I could get the paint splatter effect on the edges.

Finally I added the background, and I switched back to the pencil brush to add the line art on top. I think the background’s a little plain but overall fits the aesthetic, so I’m happy with it.

I didn’t think this whole process would take that long, but I was a perfectionist with the watercolor so it took me a few hours…which is a lot of time for something this small. I do think I’m more familiar with MediBang’s tools now though, so hopefully it will be quicker next time.

There were also some cool features of digital art that I hadn’t really considered, but I’m really glad they exist.

1.) The eyedropper tool. This tool lets you click on any color on your canvas that you already used, and your brush will immediately change to that color. So when I was alternating between the light and dark purple for the shading, I didn’t have to manually set the color every time. I could just click on those colors in a different part of the canvas.

2.) Layers. You can add layers in order to separate parts of your drawing. Whenever you draw, the change is specific to the layer you select and all of the other layers are completely unaffected. I used separate layers for the sketch, the coloring, the background, and the line art. That way if I made any mistakes, in the coloring for instance, I wouldn’t accidentally erase the sketch while erasing the coloring.

Oh, I’ve also seen artists add a white layer or reference picture on top of the drawing and gradually erase it to reveal the picture underneath, so I tried that too.

I think if I had a reference picture it might be cooler.

3.) The correction tool. Basically, it auto-straightens your lines when you draw, which was very helpful when I was trying to draw straight lines without a stylus. I used it for the line art.

4.) The undo button. Okay, I knew the undo button existed, but I have to mention it because it just made everything so much easier. I didn’t have to erase every single mistake I made (which was a lot of mistakes). It’s not like drawing on paper, where even after you erase there might still be a mark on indent on the page. I could also experiment a lot more because if I tried something and didn’t like it, I could just hit undo and delete it so easily. Point being: don’t take the undo button for granted.

Overall, digital art was fun, but in the future I’ll probably shorten the times I work on it because staring at the phone screen too much longer would probably give me a headache. But I’ll definitely keep using MediBang and trying to get better at digital art :))

The final product one last time:

Have you tried digital art? Also, I didn’t talk about this at all in the post, but what’s your favorite flower? Mine are frangipani and cherry blossoms. Hmm, maybe I should draw those next.