The first drawing project I’m working on uses the following tools:
- XPPen Deco 01 V2 Drawing Tablet 10×6.25 Inch
- GIMP 2.10.38
- Midjourney
- ChatGPT
I’m brand new to digital drawing. I chose the XP Pen Deco 01 V2 after doing research on Reddit and Amazon. So far, it is working well. I’m using GIMP because I don’t want to pay for overpriced Adobe subscriptions. I’m using Midjourney to create the image I plan to use as reference. Then I use ChatGPT to analyze the image and provide tutorial instructions for recreating the image in GIMP using the drawing pad.
I’ve always wanted to learn digital drawing. I have drawn by hand since middle school and always enjoyed it, but it has always been my brother’s thing. He’s a graphic artist for a living. My thing in the family was always music, but I’ve always enjoyed art, whether painting or sketching. I recently decided that I wanted to develop many hobbies, even if I never become master of a single one.
Here is the image I am using for reference for this first project:
Now that Midjourney makes it so easy to prompt an image that I have in my head that I want to draw, I feel like I can actually develop my artistic ability. The images are automatically in the public domain, so I don’t have to feel bad about replicating someone else’s work. Yes, I do understand how Midjourney gathers its data. But this particular image does not exist by any previous artist.
I plan to draw objects to begin. drawing humans and animals is so much more difficult, but I do hope to reach that point some day. I like being able to generate characters using Midjourney, but I want to be able to teak those characters as I want or need.
Here is a screenshot of my first few minutes as I’ve followed ChatGPT’s instructions in GIMP:
For some reason, when I created a new layer in GIMP and dropped the reference image in, the image was zoomed in. I tried resizing, but to no avail. That’s alright, though. It just gives more focus to the airship itself. I’ll worry about that in future projects. The screenshot shows my initial attempts at outlining.
I expect this project to take a few weeks. Future projects should hopefully take less time as I learn the software and get more confident.
Integrate. Create. Transform. Let’s build the lives we always imagined.
-Zed