Doodle Diaries: Drawing with a Tablet, Oh Fun

I bought my tablet as a Christmas present for myself and I love it to bits.

Drawing digitally, however, has been a major pain in the butt with a pretty steep learning curve.

I haven't drawn on the tablet as much as I would have liked, but since 2017 is already half over, here are progress pics from the past six months.

2016/12/25
Literally first ever tablet drawing

Drawing with a tablet is VERY different from drawing on paper, or even drawing with a phone. 

This took more time and effort than you think it would. It takes time getting used to the tablet.

2016/12/25

I took a photo of some pencil drawings I did and lined/colored them in.

It looks a lot better than the cat, but still looks sloppy. I still have no idea how to color.

2016/12/26

I started to rough sketch, lineart, and color entirely by tablet. My drawings did not come out the way I wanted them to, everyone had weird faces and proportions.

2016/12/26

Mom: Is that a girl? That looks like a girl.
Me: It's supposed to be a guy...
Robert: Why does he have Trump hands?
Me: *cries*

2016/12/30

Mom: That's a guy right?
Me: IT'S A GIRL.

After spending the last week of 2016 getting a hang of the tablet and fiddling with lining/coloring styles, I decided to churn out some drawings with actual effort as 2017 rolled in.

The sunflowers took forever to draw, and they also came out looking better than the guy.

2017/02/06 

Whoops I guess I never finished this - I wanted to draw a height chart/group picture of my OCs. At least you can see how I rough sketch and then line things.

2017/02/13

Not really a full-fledged drawing, but I did a study on some action poses and tried coloring my lineart to see how it looked like. I didn't like how the colored lines came out.

2017/03/05

Tried a whole bunch of new techniques! They look like they're actually in the dark outdoors! I meant to add more light reflected on the two but I never got around to it.

Youtube is your friend when you want to know how to draw certain effects.

1. YJS FINALLY realizes you can control opacity levels when shading so the shadows don't look harsh.

2. Using phone pictures for drawing may work if you're drawing on a phone, but not when you're drawing on a PC with a larger image file.

3. Perspective drawing is a bitch.

2017/06/04

1. Tried other tools (air brush, gradation, blur etc) for coloring and shading instead of solely relying on pen tool.

2. "Drew" the bench by taking a Google image result of an actual bench and fiddling with various tools and effects. I need to find a faster, more efficient way for this.

My most recent drawing, hot off the press. Coloring still needs work, but it's been looking less and less awful now! Still need to figure out what to do with my lineart for that perfect balance of smooth yet defined lines.

I hope it doesn't take too long to get better at this.