Whether you're into pixel art or not, whether you're even an artist or not, I highly recommend checking out the Pixaki app. It's a genuine delight to use on the iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil (I swear I don't work for Rizer or Apple).
You really have to be deliberate when doing pixel art. Moving, adding, deleting, or changing the color of a single pixel can significantly affect the piece as a whole. With Pixaki felt like I could jump in and have fun right away and then discover the many well thought out features as I went along. And honestly, it's the diving right in part that matters more to me. I haven't done another animation since this one but I like knowing the feature is there and easy to use.
This is sounding more like a paid review than I intended. $25 seems steep for a pixel art app when there's free options out there, but Pixaki is a polished, deep app.
Unlike much of my art, this piece didn't start on pencil and paper. I began right in Pixaki but then liked the result so much that I went to paper. I drew this on some fancy watercolor paper to paint in some time in the future.
I created this using Procreate on the iPad Pro. I've been experiencing a bit of artist's block so I decided to finish all the incomplete drawings sitting in Procreate gallery rather than frustratingly stare at blank pieces of paper and empty, white digital canvases at 1am. Partially out of laziness (I don't enjoy or have much time to draw backgrounds) and partially because I like they pop in a social media feed, I decided to go with a solid, brightly colored background. While swiping along in Instagram, I saw several artists using this technique and it really stood out.
Like a lot of my digital work, this one started out with a journal sketch that showed promise until I botched the inks. What I like about good ol' fashioned drawing on paper is that there's no undo button so ideas get put down faster and with more confidence. I don't spend 5 minutes trying to perfect a single line. What I find frustrating about drawing on paper is that there's no undo button. I am slowly getting more confident that if I erase something I don't like, even most of a sketch, I'll be able to recreate it while also fixing what felt wrong the first time.
I snap a picture of the sketch with my phone, sometimes correcting for poor perspective/proportions in the drawing by shooting from an angle, adjust contrast and lighting in the Darkroom app if necessary and then import it into Procreate. I don't spend much time messing with the sketch before importing since it's likely to go through a lot of changes in the first digital pencils stage. For a sketch that needs a lot of work, I'll usually do two passes on the iPad; a “pencils” pass in light blue (a habit from the old days) then an “inks” pass.
Once the inks are done, if I plan on coloring it, I use something like the ArtPose app or Daz3D to create a quick mockup of my character's pose then light it. ArtPose has pretty ugly lighting and limited controls but it's good enough to get the rough idea. Daz3D is much easier to pose figures with and control lights but its rendering process is really opaque making it overly difficult to create nice lighting. But the default preview rendering is enough to get the rough idea, which is all I'm going for. My style isn't photoreal and I'm not sure I have the skill or interest to create realistic art.
Once I have my lighting reference I start laying in color, beginning with mid-tones, then shadows, lighter tones and finally bright highlights. I still haven't figured out how to use Procreate's blender brushes so any gradations are made using a soft edged airbrush. Once my color is done, I export to Photoshop for another color pass since that's much faster and more precise than Procreate's options for making image adjustments. As well I may do some additional Liquifying in Photoshop and then I'm done.
Skull. Head. Digital Art
