My Digital Secrets

From someone who LOVES paper

Hi Pencil Pals!

I thought I’d share my digital art adventures.

BTW I wrote this post last year, and it is buried in the depths of my website somewhere, so I thought it’d be good to have it here on Substack so it’s nice and easy to find.

Since writing this newsletter I have sold my Wacom Cintiq. It wasn’t for me, but my pal Gillian O’Mara fancies a go, so it’s off to live with Gillian.

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I have always worked on paper, always. I love the feel of paper, all the happy accidents... I won’t stop drawing on paper, but I want to explore the digital alternatives for making my picture books. After all, an iPad or a computer is a tool like any other.

I want to know, will working digitally make my practice easier, quicker and better?

Why easier?

I spend many hours getting frustrated when drawings aren’t working out the way I want them to. Whenever I make a mistake I have to get a new piece of paper and start again. Wouldn’t it be good if things flowed more easily?

Why quicker?

Maybe there is no way of working quicker. And why is working quicker a good thing anyway? Well, publishing advances are not going up, but the cost of living is. So if I can find a quicker way to work that would be wonderful!

How better?

We are all striving to make better art, aren’t we? And that never ends, no matter where we are in our career. And when I get excited about something, I like to follow my nose, it usually means there’s something exciting to discover. So when I got the itch to go digital I ran with it…

Learning on the job

I have always found the best way to learn anything is on the job. I find learning something in theory is boring and I usually give up. But learning on the job with the extra pressure of a deadline looming puts the fire up ma’ whatsit and forces me to learn fast!

Do publishers mind how you make your work?

No.

I have made nearly all of my books by hand on paper, and recently I have made books digitally, and both are entirely acceptable to publishers. They just want good work, they don’t mind how it’s made.

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Here are the digital techniques I’ve tried:

Photoshop - hand-drawn hybrid method

Fairy Tales made on Photoshop

I made my book, ‘First Fairy Tales’ using a hybrid method of drawing in black ink on bits of paper, scanning them, and manipulating them in Photoshop to add colour and texture using the debaser tool.

Cost of Photoshop: £9.98/ month

Cost of the Debaser Tool: $34

Cost of scanner: I have an ancient A4 Epson Photo scanner that cost me about £80 twenty five years ago. I’ve dropped it twice on my wooden floor and it’s still going strong. It does the job perfectly!

Results

I LOVE how the book looks, the debaser tool is wonderful. It gives that lovely screen printed retro look that I love. 

But it took me longer than working by hand and there were all the mind-numbing hours of boring scanning! 

It was a long book: nine chapters, and it took me so long that the advance I was paid didn’t reflect the hours I put in. It was a really stressful time financially.

I will never make such a heavily illustrated book using that technique again. I would probably do a one-off commission this way, but not a book on that scale, the figures don’t add up.

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Affinity Photo/ hand-drawn hybrid method

Saving Mr Hoot made on Affinity Photo

I made my picture book, ‘Saving Mr Hoot’ by painting in colour on pieces of paper, then scanning them in and building up layers on Affinity Photo. It allowed me the flexibility to change things without starting the whole illustration again. And I could ‘up the colours’ to make the yellow and the orange really pop. 

I am a big fan of Affinity Photo, it’s almost exactly the same as Photoshop but is waaaay cheaper. It has a one-off affordable fee rather than a subscription model like Photoshop. 

Cost of Affinity photo: £48 but there’s a 50% sale at the moment (this is not an ad, I just REALLY like it!)

Results

I love the results visually, ‘Saving Mr Hoot’ looks great, but it took just as long as working by hand and the endless scanning, arg! 

In summary, I would probably work this way again if it suited the project.

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A Wacom Cintiq Drawing Screen

The Wacom Cintiq is a big drawing screen, as big as a picture book, so you can work at full size. It connects to your desktop computer and you can use it with any art program you have on your desktop. I tried it with the lovely affordable Affinity Photo and my old faithful (expensive) friend Photoshop.

Cost of Wacom Cintiq Pro 24: approx £2600 

Adjustable flex arm: £349

Cost of brushes: I spent over £100 in search of the perfect digital brushes

Results

I don’t like the feel of the Wacom pen in my hand. It’s too light. And it makes a plastic-rattly noise.

I don’t like how inflexible the Wacom pen is. Let me explain: With an Apple Pencil you can tilt it onto its side as you would with a real pencil and get a nice thick textured line. I realise this is something I do all the time: I use the point of my pencil, AND the side of my pencil, instinctively, without thinking. So I don’t like that you can ONLY draw using the pointy end of the Wacom Cintiq pen.

Comparing the Apple Pencil to the Wacom pen

Also, I don’t like the choice of brushes for Affinity Photo or Photoshop as much as I like the Procreate brushes. I spent days and weeks searching for good watercolour brushes that match my handmade work, but never found anything to match the real thing, or to match the Procreate versions.

I just couldn’t make any artwork that made my eyes happy. In the end, I gave up and my crazy expensive Wacom Cintiq would be gathering dust in the corner of my studio, except that my 13-year-old daughter loves it! Phew!

I know lots of people love them, especially comic artists and animators, but so far, it’s not for me.

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An iPad Pro and Apple Pencil

New book out in June made on Procreate

I made my new book (title still under wraps), which will be published by Walker Books later this year, using Procreate. 

I bought a refurbished iPad and Apple pencil here at the CEX shop (or the sex shop as @katiedraws calls it ). Second hand is waaay more affordable and better for the planet!

And I got a Paperlike screen protector (recommended by our @katiedraws) to make the screen feel more papery.

You can use all sorts of art packages on an iPad, but I went for Procreate. Nice and affordable and easy to use.

Cost of second hand iPad: 12.9" 5th Gen 2TB about £1,200 

Cost of second hand Apple Pencil 2: about £105 

Cost of Paperlike screen protector: £34

Cost of Procreate:  $9.99

Cost of brushes: You can use the ones that come with the app, or shop around and find ones that mimic your handmade work. Or make your own.

#childhoodillustrated drawings made on Procreate

Results
I LOVE it! The Apple Pencil has a nice weight in my hand. I can draw with the pointy end, or tilt it and use the side of the pencil. 

Procreate is easy to learn, especially if you are familiar with Photoshop or Affinity Photo, I just picked it up as I went along. It’s very instinctive.

The brushes available for Procreate are AMAZING. I was able to find brushes that matched my handmade work perfectly. 

I have found I can work in exactly the way I did on paper. I’m not sure anyone would be able to tell whether my work was handmade or digital.

What does the publisher think?

The publisher told me they are happy for me to work on Procreate, they have a few illustrators using it already. They told me they find it harder to match the colours, but they are happy and willing to work that out when we get there. Illustrators using Procreate as a professional tool is reasonably new, and I guess publishers will iron out the colour matching problems as it becomes more normal.

I always thought that Procreate could only make RGB images, but it turns out that’s not true. I found the CMYK options here in ‘colour profile’.

Publishers traditionally prefer illustrators to make work using CMYK files because there's a wider spectrum of colour options with RGB, meaning when you convert to CMYK for printing, there's a chance your printed colours won't exactly match your original intentions. So if you make your work in CMYK, the printer will be able to match your colours more accurately.

Mindset is important

Of course, I have to have the same mindset as I do on paper. NO FIDDLING, take the drawing as it comes. Don’t be tempted to overwork or fix everything. Don’t zoom in and make tiny details with a smaller brush, after all, you can’t zoom in on paper, so the same rules apply. 

These are just my rules, maybe your rules would be different.

Salty Sea Dog for The Good Ship and images for my website, all made on Procreate.

The results of my digital messing about:

I LOVE making digital art using PROCREATE on my iPad

I don’t have to be at my desk with jars of water, tubes of paint and a lightbox etc. And for that reason, I can do half an hour of work whenever and wherever I fancy, even on the train, on my bed or in front of the telly with my family.

Is it quicker? 

Yes! I just made a book with as many illustrations as the book of Fairy Tales, and it took half the time. So the advance I was paid was proportional to the time it took. Phew!

Is it better?

That’s a hard one to judge, how shall I value ‘better’? Well, it got me excited to create, I learned new stuff (good for the brain there’s Alzheimer’s in my family so I like to keep learning new stuff), I like the results visually, and I can import images (paintings, photos or prints from Pinterest) with a colour palette I like and use the eyedropper tool to steal the palette, so that is AMAZING! 

What else do I like?

I like drawing small, my drawing is always better on a smaller scale, so the iPad being small is not a drawback, in fact, I think it’s an advantage.

The only drawback I have found is that if I don’t support the iPad on a table/ iPad stand, my arm, the one that holds the iPad, gets sore. I even went to the doctors trying to work out why my left breast was sore! It turns out it was the way I was holding the iPad. So I bought this old lady tray for when I work on my bed and this old lady table for when I work on the sofa. Yes, I can work anywhere now so the bed and the sofa are my favourite places!

So those are MY thoughts… What do you think? Do you like drawing digitally or by hand? I am dying to know how you are making your work. Leave a comment below.

Helen x

PS. I wrote this follow up newsletter answering all your digital questions and updating you on my ‘illustrators boob’ here.