When It Comes to Supplies, Part Two: Digital Art Supplies hosted by "It's Simply Robyn"

Self Portrait Artwork by Robyn @ It's Simply Robyn

     This next session in my art supplies series is being hosted by my artist friend, Robyn.  Robyn works in digital art, and since I know nothing about the tools needed in that field, I thought it would be fun to have her write a post for this session.  Please read and enjoy, and check out her works!!!!

    Hi, I’m Robyn.  I’m an artist, like Stasia-Chan.  My art style is what I like to describe as illustrative cartooning with retro influences.  Last month Stasia-Chan asked me if I’d guest post on here about the digital tools I use to create my art.  I’m a bit of a hybrid artist myself.  I use traditional materials in my work, as well as digital tools.  I still use paper and pencils to sketch all my drawings, and from time to time use Copic markers to color my pieces, but I also like to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Sketchbook Pro to ink, layout and color my pieces as well.  For today’s post I’m going to talk about the digital tools I personally use to create art digitally.  Just like with traditional art, there are many ways to create art digitally.

       The first things I want to talk about are hardware based.  Obviously if you are going to create anything digitally be it writing, art, videos, etc you will want to have an external hard drive to backup all your files onto.  The rule of thumb is you should have your files backed up in at least 2 places in case one drive fails.  This could be 2 external hard drives, or a hard drive and a large thumb drive.  Once you have your system, the next thing is to make sure you backup your files often.  I back my computer up about 1x a month, unless my computer is acting a bit strange.  When it’s acting strange I then will do a backup immediately just in case things get worse.

Wacom Intuos Small Tablet.  Image from Amazon.ca

     The other piece of hardware that has been a lifesaver for me when creating art digitally is a Wacom Graphics Tablet.  These tablets plug into your computer via USB, and you use the included pen to draw on the tablet in different creative programs.  These are great for precise work like inking and coloring your art, where a mouse just doesn’t always do the trick.  I love using a Wacom tablet for everything I do digitally.  I use them for layout and design work, inking my sketches, and coloring them.  Some people do like to use these tablets to draw digitally as well, but I still prefer to draw my art traditionally.

       I’m a lefty so I find the pen easier to use the a mouse which I use with my right hand.  I also love that I don’t get as much fatigue in my wrist and hand as I do with a mouse.  I do also like that the nibs in the pen are replaceable, and that Wacom makes many different models at different price points.  The Intuos line starts at around $100 which is great for those starting to get into digital art.  The price slowly goes up to $250-500 for the Intuos Pro line, which has more features than the Intuos tablets and is aimed for those who are creative professionals.

       On the software side of things there are 3 programs I use when working digitally.  I use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.  After scanning in my sketches I bring them into Illustrator to ink them.  I prefer using Illustrator because I can use the pen tool to create a vector line art.  This means that I can rescale my art at any point in the future and it won’t pixelate and degrade in quality.  Photoshop also has the pen tool, but I find it’s much easier to use in Illustrator.  Once I’ve inked the drawing in Illustrator I save the artwork as an Illustrator file (.ai) and as a Photoshop file (.psd).

Hermione bookmark illustration.
Artwork by Robyn @ It's Simply Robyn.

     I then will bring the Illustrator file into Photoshop.  Sometimes the line art isn’t jet black, so the first thing I recommend doing is adding a color overlay layer style to the line art in black, and then rasterizing the layer style.  This will color correct the line art.  I then open the template I use for my layouts and size my art inside the template.  Once that’s done I save a final version of the inked artwork as a Photoshop file (.psd) and then save the artwork as a jpeg.  From there I move onto coloring.  I prefer to color my artwork in Sketchbook Pro because it has the digital Copic Color System.  This means I can color with the makers traditionally, and use the same color system to color my artwork digitally as well.  This allows me to have a consistent look between my traditional and digital work that I love!

     There are so many ways to do things.  Some artists do use just Photoshop to ink and color, some use just Sketchbook Pro to ink and color and some may use a different program altogether.  There are so many different ways to do things so if you’re interested in getting into working digitally, I recommend downloading the free 30 day trials of different programs and seeing which ones you feel work well for you and your art!  All these programs do have a bit of a learning curve.  Photoshop and Illustrator can take a some time and practice to get comfortable with, but Sketchbook pro was pretty easy to pick up right off the bat.

       I want to thank Stasia-Chan for asking me to guest blog on her blog.  I’ve really enjoyed writing this post.  I hope you enjoyed reading about some of the many tools out there for creating digitally.  Check out these posts on my website if you want to know more about Sketchbook Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and Wacom Graphics Tablets and be sure to visit Adobe, Autodesk and Wacom's websites for more information as well.  If you would like to know more about me or my work, you can find me at my Website, Facebook Page, and Instagram Page!

-Robyn