digital art
Making friends with Zen Brush app
Zen Brush is a beautiful little app with only one step of undo and no way to save anything in its original format. No layers, the eraser is very primitive and does not help much, so best to leave it alone and pretend it’s not there at all. One black brush, two translucent gray brushes and an option to change the brush size. All brushes are round and look more and more like painting wet on wet as their sizes grow. That’s it. The app would be almost like a Zen board where your creating is gone forever unless you were quick enough to take a photo. Similarly, Zen Brush has an option to export the drawing as a PNG file.
Lovely thing for quick sketches.
A sketch a day: snow landscape
My first semi-serious attempt to do a more than a rudimentary sketch in ArtFlow app. You know what’s the best part of working in it? It saves all changes automatically and seemingly in real time, at least I haven’t lost anything yet. And I think if I ever hit the limit on the number of layers in the file it will be my phone’s fault, not the app’s.
A sketch a day: at the beach
A joint effort of Corel Painter Mobile and Art Flow (both Android apps), with Painter carrying out most of it because it is so good at faking oil paints. I don’t like how real oils smell and how messy the entire process is, so digital looks like a nice alternative.
A sketch a day: digital horse
I am gradually making friends with Painter Mobile Pro. Most of it happens on the Galaxy 5 phone because the screen on my tablet responds to a stylus a little erratically. The phone allows to draw surprisingly precise thin lines, it does not mind blending, smudging, or multiple layers. Well, for the most time. Every now and then it needs a little time to show me the result. Very handy for sketching on the go but still does not exactly a replacement for real tools and paper.
Sketchy horse
“Sketchy” is a style in Harmony that I like the most. Besides being imprecise and somewhat unpredictable by nature, it does not take kindly to thinking as you draw. The result is always a disaster, and the later in the process it happens the worse it looks. Since this is my first attempt to draw a horse in Harmony, disasters happened more than once. Luckily, I only use black and white, so for the most part when black gets out of control I managed to offset it with white. It’s not exactly erasing, but I think it works.
Other things I learned:
– colors in the color wheel come out anything but what I select and what shows in the preview square. Grays always have some odd tint, so I had to drop the idea of using them, or this would be one psychedelic horse head. I was not in the mood for psychedelic at all.
– apparently just because you can draw on the sides of the toolbox that is centered at the top of the page, it does not mean that you can draw behind it too; that’s how the horse lost nice pointy ears that I was going to give her
A growing… something
I haven’t visited Harmony for a long time, not even sure why. It’s a great place to get unstuck (and I am stuck thoroughly with an abstract piece right now), to unwind after a stressful day, and to doodle away no matter what your circumstances are.
Harmony is perfectly capable of helping you make realistic art, but that I could do on my own, right? So for the most part me and Harmony create strange things like this one.