Should you learn to draw using an iPad Pro?

The pros and cons of painting with pixels.

My birthday is today (sweet sixteen!) and reaching 1000 followers on Medium is the best present I could’ve hoped for from you guys. Thanks so much! Now, here is my present to you: a blog post!

My 13 year old brother Zach and his best friend have been working on creating a certain set of super-hero-like characters since they were nine, and one day printed out a set of cards with all the different traits and abilities.

They created a game with the cards, and I played a round or two before announcing that what this game needed was an artist to draw all of the characters onto the cards.

When they agreed with long faces, I told them I was willing to be that artist, if they promised that afterwards they would create a Kickstarter campaign to make the game a reality (and give me half the profits..)

So then I was hit with a problem, which was that I had no clue what I was doing.

Like I’ve said in earlier blog posts, growing up I only ever drew people’s faces. I never drew below the neck, and I never drew animals or backgrounds or anything. When I was asked to draw two different picture books, both featuring talking animals, I was forced to expand my horizons and learn how to draw squirrels and pigs. Through that I learned that a big part of being an artist is being able and willing to draw things that you’ve never drawn before.

But after writing an inspirational blog post about this new goal of mine, I slowly backtracked to my old ‘drawing should always be fun’ scenario, and drew bodiless heads once more, this time comforting myself with an occasional ‘full body, but just standing there awkwardly doing nothing’ pose.

I was proud of this picture an embarrassingly short amount of time ago. But it demonstrates my point perfectly.

So now, the only solution for this card game business was to perfect the faces first. There were lots of faces to draw and get approved by Zach and his friend, and so I could easily learn how to draw action poses in the meantime.

The way I learn to draw on the iPad Pro is by taking advantage of reference photos. This is not something you can do as easily and quickly with a real pad and paper.

Here I just cut up a photo of the same person in different poses, so that I could draw right next to each pose and get the proportions better.

When I used to draw and paint with real brushes rather than pixels, I would often get so caught up in looking for new art supplies that I forgot to actually make art. In the back of my mind I thought that if I just bought the proffessional paints and markers, then I would be a proffessional artist. This mindset didn’t get me anywhere because it put my focus not on actually working hard to improve my skill, but on trying to find ways to make money for more art supplies.

One of the best things about switching to pixels was being able to look at other digital artists’ work knowing that they all had the exact same tools and resources as I did.

My attempts at drawing action stick figures, which I will probably be very ashamed of later.

But when I was using photoshop on my computer, there were different problems for my young and easily distracted self. Every tool imaginable was available to me right there in front of my eyes, and my paintings often reflected that.

The painting process became less focused on what I was painting and more focused on trying to test out all the different digital brushes on the same canvas and calling it a masterpiece.

Hmm, the tool bars are taking up more screen space than the actual picture..

I think this is a common problem for beginner artists who jump right to the digital realm, as I’ve seen it in a lot of other young artist’s pieces. Instead of getting set on buying art supplies, they are set on learning the program more thoroughly than they actually need to.

Drawing on the iPad Pro however takes the beautiful simplicity of a regular pencil and paper and combines it with all the advantages of drawing digitally.

Being as distraction free as possible is a huge deal for artists, and the app ‘Procreate’ provides you with that while at the same time being a fully capable program, producing new masterpieces every day.

A painting I made when I woke up way too early at my friend’s lake house sleepover. For the record, I never would have brought a whole set of painting supplies to this trip, and so would have been bored out of my mind for a good half hour.

My point in all this is not that the iPad Pro is the one stop shop to making any old someone into an artistic genius. But what I’ve learned is that when it comes to learning how to draw or paint, your mindset is key, and the iPad Pro just happened to help me achieve a much better mindset than before.