Musings of an Arthritic Artist: Delving Into Digital Art

Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! For today's post, I'm going to be sharing some of the digital art I have attempted over the last 2-ish months. I haven't been practicing regularly, instead mostly working at random times.

I'm not going to be explaining what I did for every piece because there are about 40 digital art pieces in this post. Instead, I will be explaining the first three, then I'll just show them consecutively. I don't want to bog down this post with too many words; it's already going to be long enough as is.

Let's get into my first digital art gallery!

King, Alexandria. Musings of an Arthritic Artist. 2021.

I have never given much thought to doing digital art. My only experience with digital art has come from playing Pokemon Art Academy and Disney Art Academy on the Nintendo 3DS. I don't have a tablet to draw on and due to my wrist issues, I can't use a computer mouse for hours on end. The movement and constant grip on the mouse strains my wrist. Then, I realized I could use my keyboard to draw on Microsoft Paint by simply using the direction keys and the space bar.

After finding this out, I decided to try my hand at digital art. I'm not good, but I want to get better. If I could do both traditional and digital art, I feel as if it'll be a useful skill, just in case I ever run into problems with either. At the moment, I'm just trying to get a handle on the space bar use. Using the space bar and direction keys is interesting because it functions kind of like an Etch-A-Sketch, which I loved using when I was younger, but I haven't used one in a couple years. It's a tiny bit harder on the Etch-A-Sketch though, due to the twisting motion of the knobs.

After using Microsoft Paint a couple times, I started using Autodesk Sketchbook, which I initially found on my family's laptop. After this, I saw it on my desktop and experimented with it. The majority of the digital art pieces in this post were created using Autodesk Sketchbook.

King, Alexandria. Stormy Gray. March 15, 2021. Microsoft Paint.

I was using the oil paint tool with my mouse. I took a break in between, so I was able to do something. As I mentioned in my creative block post (linked here: 7 Simple Ways to Escape Artist's/Writer's Block (opens in new window)), one of my favorite things to draw is eyes, so I decided to do a quick eye. I think this took me about 15-20 minutes once I got into it. It isn't great, but I don't think it's awful.

King, Alexandria. Vine. March 15, 2021. Microsoft Paint.

I also painted this vine (which is also one of my automatic go-tos for drawing). Personally, I don't like the leaves on this vine, but I do like the color I used for the highlights.

King, Alexandria. Untitled. March 28, 2021. Autodesk Sketchbook.

In Autodesk Sketchbook, there are symmetry tools. You can pick one of three. The first is two halves divided vertically. The second is two halves divided horizontally. The third functions as radial symmetry (think of a pizza divided into at least 3 pieces that can quickly become 16 pieces) The radial symmetry tool is how I've done the majority of the following pieces.