About Digital Drawing

My name is Jerry Emerson. You will know I am a digital artist if you have spent time on my site. What you may not know is how I create a digital drawing.

First, I use special tools. Instead of a pen, brush, or pencil, I use an electronic pen stylus and a pressure-sensitive tablet. Second, I use a precisely calibrated professional monitor at 10-bit color for my canvas.

As a digital artist, I manipulate a monitor’s red, green, and blue pixels to adjust their arrangement, brightness, hue, and saturation. On the average monitor, such as you may be using, the bit depth is 8. But a digital artist usually requires 10-bit color depth. 10-bit color produces over a billion colors with expanded grayscaling. In contrast, an 8-bit monitor has millions of colors.

Over the years, I have encountered comments that express a mistaken notion concerning digital art. That notion is that the digital artist can program apps to create digital artwork. ( Yes, apps exist now that can do just this, but to call it art is unfair, as no human artist is directly involved.)

This notion would mean the digital artist needs no inherent or minimal talent to draw digitally. In short, master the app, master the art.

Many digital artists draw freehand using raster-based apps like Photoshop, Sai, and Clip Paint Studio. But alternatively, the digital artist can use vector-based apps or mix vectors with raster-based productions. Raster, or bitmaps, uses pixels to build an image. Images on the web are raster-based. On the other hand, vector uses paths and curves dictated by mathematical formulas, allowing for precise and detailed picture resizing.

I like to draw raster images freehand. Sometimes I mix my freehand art with image tools called plug-ins and filters. Many are available to digital artists in Photoshop. These tools enable me to manipulate images, or parts of them, to achieve unique visual effects.

Regardless of work choices and apps, what matters most to digital artists are skilled hands governed by the brain, innate ability, imagination, and experience. Indeed, is this not how artists have always created their art with traditional media and tools? Only the available tools have changed.