The Challenges of Making Digital Art.

It’s been week two of my adventures in making art digitally and the tech side of it is a challenge. The disconnect I feel if I use a graphics tablet and a screen separately is simply too great. The software is awesome but mind-boggling and there are almost too many possibilities. The pieces below are drawn directly on the screen of a Chromebook which solves that problem of disconnection but the screen is so slippery and the app is basic and limited. At the moment those limitations are welcome and I find them reassuring.

I’m balancing these challenges with creating the paintings themselves using the same process as I do creating analogue art: adding lots of thin, transparent layers, not subtracting anything from the image and also allowing ‘mistakes’ to remain as they contribute to the uniqueness of the painting. I don’t use the ‘undo’ button just as I don’t use an eraser in my analogue work.

Here are four finished pieces.

The next one is a bit different. Different parts of me like to paint different subjects in different ways.