Artists, can I ask you something?

[ButterflyEmpress]

This is one of the oldest digital drawings I have. It was before I had a tablet, so I'd draw in MS Paint with either a mouse or a laptop track pad.

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I got a drawing tablet and paint tool sai back in 2014. The thing that I find most difficult about digital drawing is line art. I still heavily rely on a stabilizer. I don't know how artist can do without one.

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This is where I'm at now. I use CSP now and I still have the same tablet, plus an iPad for drawing on the go. I think the iPad is a lil more slippery than a tablet, but it's quick to get used to and they also have screen protectors that mimic paper if it helps. I kinda prefer the iPad more since I can draw directly on the screen, but I still need a stabilizer.

[Freemints30]

My start

Where I am now

[lynestjules]

I had just finished my first year of college and was still new to it. My roommate who was a classmate of mine was very talented and she taught me a lot about digital painting on Photoshop, since it's not something we covered in Photoshop class. I studied art, animation & web design.

I think this is the first digitally coloured piece. But, the drawing itself was done in my sketchbook. (Photoshop, 2004)

This is the first fully digital piece I did. It's one of the draft designs of the Winter castle for my current comic series.(Photoshop, 2005)

And this is my latest piece from this month. The cover for the newest chapter of my comic series.(Clip Studio Paint, 2020)

[Candlebite]

Oh... wayyyyyyyyy back around 2012 -2014
Not my first though, my first digital picture was... VERY badly drawn before getting used to it.

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my current Art

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Yeah theyre the same characters from my comic Devoured World; Neon & Regi (and V who i just ended up fusing his character into Regi) just designed better.
The initial idea for the story was Waay different back then

[artamazon]

2002 - not my oldest digital art, but what I can find right now.

2020- only a mere 18 years later, lol.

[krissyhalo]

I really started digital art last year. So here's comparing a piece I did back in November and a comic piece that I've done fairly recently. The comic strip is supposed to come out the first Sunday of November, but I might as well share it so that you can see how much progress I've made in the past year.

Honestly, I'd really like to get a better handle on anime human anatomy. Chibi anatomy is really easy to get my mind around but human anatomy is a different story. I also want to learn more about effects in Clip Studio Paint too. That'd be a lot of fun!

[amthecomic]

I started drawing digitally two times. The first time was with one pretty trashy drawing tablet linked to my old laptop which needed an hour to process the most minimalistic things. I was 15 years old back than and it was a true pain in the ass.
This is one character sheet I did back than.

Now 6 years later tablets have evolved a lot, so I started again this march by drawing my first webcomic. Here are some of the first panels.

The comic is gonna be finished soon. Its so satisfying to see how the progress over the few months!

[joannekwan]

I got my first tablet in 2008
and here was a drawing from 2009 (thanks fb for keeping this lol)

And then over ten years later on the same tablet that I still use to this day

The biggest improvement digitally is just getting more confident with lines basically. Both pieces were done in Photoshop without any sort of line stabilizer. Also over the years I gained a stronger grasp of colors (from self-study) and anatomy (from college classes).

[Mallory]

I started drawing digitally about 14 years ago? My guitar teacher lent me the tiniest wacom bamboo tablet that had a work area of like 3"x4" or something. I went and dug up some stuff I drew from ye olde internet annals.

Newest stuff (as of this year).

I always liked to draw, I have like, drawings since I was 2 years old (no joke - though they were obviously quite... abstract). By FAR studying reality even for like 0.0003% of the time is the fastest way to improve. Both the real world, and other artists' approaches to how they depict it. Yours truly is lazy so my improvement has been slow .

[Rhonder]

I was a traditional artist for the longest time, starting from a very young age. Around middle school I decided that I wanted to start taking art more "seriously" as a hobby (i.e. actually studying things like color and anatomy rather than just doing whatever all the time) and also started growing from primarily pencil and colored pencil into marker art.

At the end of high school/first year of college I got my first digital drawing tablet but... I admittedly didn't use it very often. Here was the first 2 works I ever did on it:

I used it here and there for the years afterwards, but I was busy with school and didn't do much drawing in general. I mostly kept to pencil drawings in sketch books and marker illustrations here and there.

After college I decided I wanted to try out comic making again (something I had done in middle and high school but not at all in college) and so I initially was going to try and do it in marker, but decided pretty quickly that altho my digital line art wasn't very good, it was still beneficial to do the coloring digitally for ease, consistency, & cost. That comic project flopped but I started my Tapas comic the following year, with the same work flow- trad inks, digital colors.

After a few months of doing that I decided I finally wanted to upgrade to a screen tablet in early 2019. I saw immediate improvements in most aspects of my digital art after that (the screen was part of it, but also upgrading from a tablet with 1000 levels of pressure to 8000 lol). I decided to finish the comic I was working on with the traditional lines but I started practicing more purely digital art on the side, including a short comic that was completed for an anthology last summer.

After ending that comic last December I took a short break from art. Upon starting up again I've been working in all digital finally this year. I would like to get back to doing some marker illustrations here and there tbh, but for comic work which is already super long and time consuming I've been loving the change to digital~

Here are some recent all digital pics:

[migxmeg]

Yang Wen-li . Also loving the space theme, been in a sci fi mood.

[Mallory]

Yessssss, Yang! My favourite character in a long time. I kinda preferred the look of the old FPA uniforms over the new ones so I wanted to draw him. And I live and breathe sci-fi and space haha.

[silverraven0]

Funnily enough these two were what I’m able to make when I just started digital art with MediBang on my phone in 2017, but come 2018 and it became like this

I pretty much have no idea what the f*ck I’m doing and I can’t color for s*it. XD

I’m better now, but still not the best.

[kkaawmics]

I got my first drawing tablet in July 2018, and that marked my first attempts at digital art which you can see below.

As of now in 2020, this is one of my recent works. I chose an illustration for better comparison since I felt like it was unfair to use a comic panel haha

I'm traditionally trained in 2-D inking, oil painting, and colored pencils though (mostly objects and animals). I did that for probably 10 years and stopped art altogether when I went to college in 2013. So 2018 was my first attempt at art wholesale in 5 years .

[CosmicLeon]

i like working with mixed media, so i opten draw my pages first, then scan them in. once i get that far, i do some editing to remove the white and under sketch. before i color in flats, and then cell shading.

[AkaneHayashi]

I started drawing digitally on November 2015, and I was already drawing traditionally for about four years then. I started with an Intuos Pen small and nowadays I use iPad Air 3 more often (drawing on screen feels so much better!). I've been on hiatuses for a few times in these past years because of school/work, but now that I finally graduated I want to come back to drawing and practicing more.

My first digital drawing was this one, from November 2015:

And here's one of my latest artworks, from July 2020:

[rajillustration]

I started playing around with digital when I got a really cheap tablet for christmas (it was 5 inches ps, that was the size of the tablet) and I made art that looked like this:

And that's how I drew digitally in high school. Not middle school, high school. (lately what's expected out of kids these days kind of blows my mind)

Then I went to college, got serious about art, and did traditional illustration for the most part. I really didn't think I'd ever go fully digital like I do now, I still really love traditional, but I'm really glad I had that foundation because it did help a lot--traditional helps you do things digital, and visa versa--digital does help with your traditional game. Anyway, I got photoshop, and made some messes. This was my first illustration in photoshop and it was for a class assignment and it took over 10 hours.

I got a big fat C on this assignment, it was such a hassle. A complete disaster and I was like "I should've just done acrylic because at least I know I can do that." But, my teacher was like "no, you were the only one who went out their comfort zone and you should never stop doing that and never stop learning new things" and I was so zazzed that I continued digitally after college and now I paint like this.

This is probs not the last thing I painted, but I have quarantine brain so I don't remember what the last thing I painted was which wasn't a doodle.

[nathanKmcwilliams]

My journey with digital art was a long and weird one.
First. Way back in 2009 I made this abomination in MS Paint XD literally copy paste a picture of my face on this Godzilla poster

Then in late 2010 my wife bought me a wacom bamboo tablet for Christmas and I made a few pictures. I was so frustrated and embarrassed at how they looked, I put the tablet in a box for FIVE YEARS. I'd been drawing my whole life. These digital ones should have looked magical instantly right? (Unrealistic expectations...check.)

Then in 2015 I decided...you know what. Lemme try that digital again. And I started slow. Just tracing my traditional art. Then I started selling my own t-shirt designs. I got involved with the local heavy metal scene, and I made this for a local metal festival.

After that, I did t-shirt designs for a few more years, and the worked up the courage to start on my comic. Which by then in 2017, was already in the development process for about 15 years. I decided to start it in Pixel-Art. My comic came out in mid 2018 after I made 16 pages for it.

Which brings us to now. I've been busting my ass for the last two years. And you can probably track it all by looking back in the "Post the last thing you drew thread"
But here's my latest full color picture. I've made a lot of progress in the last 10 years, but it's not enough. I have a long road ahead of me.

[Alexandritea]

My art journey has been a long and weird one. I completely disregarded art fundamentals for far too long, which in turn lead to me being discouraged. Eventually I picked up on some knowledge in anatomy, form study and color theory to name a few. My story was also in shambles and the characters are no longer who they used to be way back in (somewhere around) 2009-2010.

I'm so ashamed of this piece I could hardly make myself post it, I don't think I've even opened the file for this reason for several years .

(and a piece I never even finished)

and here are some of the pieces of the more refined characters and story which I am not as ashamed of .

[Dysis]

That's awesome! Massive improvement @Alexandritea !