By: Adair Bingham
I look back on my old art a lot. I probably look back on it more than it deserves, truth be told. Flipping through my sketchbooks from four years ago really helps me to measure the progress I’ve made in my work and helps me gather some confidence when I’m feeling beaten down. I’ve always considered myself to be an artist, but it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started to take art a bit more seriously, and actually put time and care into what I was creating. At the end of 2018, I decided to take things a bit further and finally transition to the world of digital art.
My current tools of the trade are a Picasso Simbans Art Tablet and the program Autodesk Sketchbook, a completely free art program that comes loaded with stylish brushes, advanced settings and a lot more. The transition from traditional to digital art was (and continues to be) a jarring experience, and even two and a half years into it, I find myself trying to learn how to properly use the programs and the tablet itself. I still color on the wrong layer, select the wrong tool and go out of bounds on the canvas. I can say for a fact that the tip of my stylus has essentially been ground to a pulp with all the thick lines in my art. Still that’s what makes it a fun challenge. With each mistake that I’ve made I’ve learned twice as many skills and tricks for the medium and I can only go up from here.
I’ve got my own style and method to doing things — some might call it garish, some might say it’s cute — but even in all its messiness, I’ve come to like it. I still feel like a total novice a lot of the time, no matter what people say. At the very least, though, I can tell that I’ve made progress and that’s something to be proud of. Everything that I create has a piece of me in it, and I think that’s special all on its own. I know that I’ll find my niche and put more of my work out into the wild.
