My latest morning ritual has been to sit outside while having my coffee and working on digital sketches inspired by the feeling of the nascent day.
I started trying out digital drawing tools around 2018–okay, to be fair, I was also drawing digitally in 1989, using a mouse on a Macintosh SE/30, in the University of Texas computer lab in my dormitory, and still drawing digitally when the Photoshop 1.0 came out in 1990, again with a mouse as the input device, and I was creating digital illustrations for an engineering firm between approximately 2002 – 2004, still with a mouse. So, to be more clear, I first started trying out drawing digitally on a tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus around 2018.
The first thing I started to try to draw was character art; many of my students, especially those in the digital art program, were very proficient with character art and concept designs. I’m not going to share those here, though I’ve shared some in my Discord server [Kathleen Hudspeth Studio]. I didn’t feel very proficient with the tools, and I was using a couple of different programs to see if one worked better for me than another. I also didn’t feel that I could match my students’ more practiced use of the tools, but I did feel that my attempts helped me to be a better professor to them.
Some of the images I worked on were simply playful things, just works that I allowed myself to explore and not demand much from.
They weren’t necessarily fantastic works, but they were fun. I let it slide when things in my life became complex (work + family = the usual), but I’ve picked it up again.
Now I’m working on compositions that I intend to be similar to what I’m doing with oil paint, but freer, and with fewer expectations. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these works yet–I’m experimenting with different sizes, and I likely will have some printed to see how they hold up as physical objects.
Key, though, is that the making of them is peaceful and free. They offer me the lovely challenge that artmaking usually presents–those series of decisions about formal matters, shaped by the more editorial force of sentiment. As long as the temperature remains as idyllic as it has been, I’ll be keeping this habit.