▶ Art Diary ◀

●2022/Aug/27● I have been feeling unsatisfied with my ability to have loose painterly strokes in my digital work. The style that I gravitated towards in the past few years uses mostly opaque brushes and large fields of flat color. It has a unifying, melted quality that I prefer to digital art where it’s obvious where semitransparent strokes overlap. However, it makes the task of suggesting less important detail with economical brush strokes more important, because every brush stroke has equally hard borders. It’s like everything automatically has a large depth of field, and making shapes recede into the distance requires more attention.

Long story short, I have been doing gouache studies to practice being more economical and suggestive with brush strokes. I hadn’t been doing traditional painting for years, but for some reason It’s easier for me to set aside an hr for a painting study when it’s not on my drawing tablet. I think I’m too tempted to jump into the deep end when I have an unlimited canvas size and an undo button.

Despite all this, I want to make friends with semi-transparent brushes again. I’m sure they are useful.