Digital art is the best for my ADHD style

Sorry for the complete silence. I am playing on my digital tablet every spare moment I have. It's the new hyper focus. This is kind of a love letter to finding digital art. I have avoided it forever, when really I should have embraced it far sooner.

Mainly because of how cheap it is, for what I do.

If you've followed me for awhile, you’ll know I don't plan much when it comes to my art. I definitely fly in on the canvas, full of passion and start scribbling away. With traditional tools, I would have to make amends with the previous choices I've made.

Sometimes I chose a color that wasn't a good choice in the end of the completed painting (The grand scheme of things).

Sometimes I started a picture that I was never fully into drawing in the first place. When you do that with traditional tools, that's a physical loss of ink and paper, as well as a monetary loss. On a digital tablet, I can sketch out as many silly ideas and they can rot without any guilt on my part.

The following art was illustrated between the hours of 4am and 8am this morning.

I wanted to draw something, thought a moody landscape was it. I hit this point and ditched it, nope, not at all what my heart was feeling like working on.

Some soul searching lead to a zine idea featuring my art of extinct landmarks in my hometown. And here is another reason why I loooove digital for my art. I used to write myself notes on the side of paper, for sketch ideas and what not. And I'd lose them. I'd buy a book to keep my ideas in and absolutely never use it. It was like I’d open the book to write the idea down and the idea would dissipate. I was to use the Side of the paper or nothing else.

Till digital came along. Now I hit the “layer” button and draw right over top of my sketch ideas. Boom, no ideas lost ever again. It's really beautiful.

Thanking my years of drawing metal robots for my ability to make metal look believeable.

So I hit this point and my ADHD wants to fire ahead and add the food in the bins before I'm done rendering the metal. With digital art this is a lifesaver for me, I can use many layers, and delete them as I play around etc.

With traditional tools if I jumped ahead before I was done an area, it required hours of creative thinking to unfuck an area that wasn't ready for the thing I started in cause I was too impatient. It's a matter of playing. Every part of the painting has a set of things to bring it to life. Sometimes the idea of rendering food is more exciting than continuing on with the metal. Passion makes me impulsive but it's not always a good thing.

Illustrating food is out of my wheelhouse of what I usually do. I don't illustrate it right the first time. Something always looks off. Or the fifth time, sometimes I just don't see the food the way it is in the photo till days of attempts later.

Digital art allows me to make multiple learning attempts and then I can leave the best version while I delete my previous attempts at it.

So then I wanted to work on a drawing of a crow in a nest with pretty Shiney things he’s added to it. Based off a photo I saw earlier this year.

Ooooh I am having so much fun with these details..Drawing the chain links is so soothing, keeps me focused and it’s a meditation of sorts. I’m aware there's brushes out there that will recreate chains for me….but I truely enjoy drawing it piece by piece. Embrace the imperfections. They add charm to the whole picture.

I had some freedom with traditional art to play around and try my original ideas. But I would always hit a point where I would have to think logically, I had bills to pay, and I needed to make sure I had the supplies ready for commissions to pay those bills.

Now, I have more freedom than I realised. And I can take my ideas I've fleshed out digitally, and pursue them with traditional tools with a little more thought process to it. Little less chaos, but I still worked through my chaotic methods…just worked it out digitally.

I attack the tablet similarly to how I attack the physical canvass. I have the digital pen ready to put out wide brush strokes of paint. Sometimes I catch myself because it isn't a canvas, I should be mindful not to crack the screen.

I now have the ability to click “delete” to the parts that I don't like anymore. I don't have to think creatively and somewhat desperately to save a painting anymore. It's nice. And the colors remain truer, as I'm not muddying them up with too many layers of opposing colors either. I have once changed a background in a large painting from Pink, to Tourquise, and then to orange. Digital art allows me to change my mind a million times without affecting my budget, my tools or the painting colors.

I'm under a blanket of snow and we have had blizzards almost daily for the last week. So I'm feeling like drawing this crow basking in the sun of a beautiful summer, with a rainbow around him as a result of the sun landing on his bounty…that glorious golden hour before dusk.

But when I go to finish this, whenever I do, I may want to change that. And I can, thanks to deleting layers. I'm free to leave my notes for my future self the next time I revisit it, and I can alter it without muddying colors.

For a fast ADHD artist like me on a budget, the digital art discovery has been a blessing.