Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about one of the advantages of having multiple types of art supplies today. This is because, although there are a lot of good reasons to have a range of tools at your disposal, one of the main reasons is that you can still keep up your art practice if one of them malfunctions.
I ended up thinking about this after having some issues with the “Paintbrush” and “Airbrush” tools in an open-source image editing program called “GIMP 2.10”. When I dragged the brushes across the screen, they didn’t create a smooth and soft line any more but instead resulted in a line of harsher individual brush marks. Reinstalling the program twice, resetting some tool options and even shouting at the computer didn’t seem to fully solve this.
Still, I wanted to keep up my art practice. Since my original plans to make some digital art based on a photo of a sunset seemed to be scuppered, I eventually decided to make an ink drawing, scan it and then edit it using another – much older – program called “JASC Paint Shop Pro 6” (1999) that I also had. Although it meant that my art looked like something I’d made in the mid-late 2010s, I was at least able to make a “backup” piece of art. Namely this:
Enjoy this extra piece of “bonus art”, which I eventually didn’t need to use.
Although using this old program as my primary editing tool (rather than as a secondary one for a few basic things) was a bit of an interesting challenge, I was actually able to improvise a few more things than I’d expected. For example, I was able to add a smooth gradient to the character’s hair by using the program’s “motion blur” feature.
Surprisingly, this extra creative thinking led to me taking another look at “GIMP 2.10” and eventually finding a way to heavily reduce – but not fully solve – the issues that I was having with the brushes (by lowering the “hardness” and/or “force” levels for the brushes, and also using blurring effects to smooth everything out a bit). This then allowed me to make a version of the digital art I’d originally planned to make – which didn’t really look as good as what I’d hoped to make, but still looked ok. Here’s a preview:
This is a detail from a digital art piece that should be posted here on the 13th October.
Anyway, the point of this is that having multiple art supplies and practicing with them can really come in handy if there is ever an issue with one of them. If a pen runs out of ink, if an image editing program malfunctions etc… then having a slightly larger repertoire of art supplies can allow you to carry on making art. Not only that, as hinted earlier, it can also make you think a little bit more creatively too.
———–
Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂
PekoeBlaze - the official blog 