Day 4: Digitize
Tonight I’ve gone down a YouTube software tutorial rabbit hole and I’m writing this between videos. The goal: learn something new about drawing digitally. This also explains the title of this post! I’m in the process of digitizing my analog brain.
To be clear, this whole digitization process is not something that I’m resisting. I’ve been trying to make this shift with varying degrees of success for years. First came a tablet. You know, the thing with the USB cord and the magic pen. I still love using it for editing photos and digital renderings, but for drawing? Too much distance.
Around the same time came an iPad, which was fun to play around with, but it was just before the time that you could get a decent pressure sensitive stylus, so the results were… underwhelming. As a result, most of my surface design work (more about this another day) is done on paper before it gets scanned and then edited digitally. It’s nice, it’s slow, and there’s probably a better way to get the results I want.
Enter a new iPad, a very high-tech pencil, and an overabundance of software. Progress.
After a few months of playing around, I’m starting to get the hang of all of this, but it’s very apparent to me that I’m not using any of this to its full potential. With that in mind, I decided to dedicate one of these thirty days to trying to see what this stuff can do and what other people are doing with it by observing. I’m impressed. Really, really impressed.
In many respects, this reminds me of the jump I had to make from hand drafting (yes, there’s still a drafting board under my sofa in case the power goes out or something) and drafting digitally. There’s always this pesky disconnect between input and output to contend with.
All that aside, I think the most valuable takeaway from today’s little change is recognizing that when it comes to learning new software, I tend to turn to tutorials when I’m unsure of how to do something mid-task rather than using them as a starting point. Glad I got this one out of the way early in the month, I have a feeling this lesson will serve me well later.