On Digital Drawing and the Illusion of being “Good Enough”

A few weeks ago I mentioned wanting to try my hand at digital art, and I’m happy to report . . . I am! The hand is being tried. I bought an Apple Pencil. I downloaded Procreate. I bought an iPad. (It was very expensive, but I love it, so I will buy fewer oddly-colored socks and continue not-having-a-car, and it will be fine.)

If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed the results of these purchases already: a sudden deluge of pictures featuring goat-headed people, monsters dangling people over Pits of Poison, and other odd things. Maybe you’re like, “Ah, I see Stefan fancies himself an artist now,” and are wondering what’s going on. Maybe you’re also like, “Stefan still needs a lot of practice.” Whatever the case, let me give you the backstory and REASONS for all of this.

My mom is a painter. I grew up watching her work, and traveling with her to artsy places, and wandering around museums in distant lands. When my siblings and I were kids, one of the highlights of the school year was making pictures for the Pentel's International Children's Art Exhibition. We would toil over our drawings for weeks, and send them off to Japan, and then wait for a very long time to hear whether we had won something. We usually did win something. I never got Supreme Gold - that lofty honor was achieved only by my sister - but I won several regular golds, and a number of silvers, and one year my picture was in the Pentel calendar for the month of September, which has been my peak art achievement to this day.

(The calendar probably still exists somewhere, and one day I will find it, and post it here.)

But despite art always being a big part of my life, it was never something I worked at. I pursued music, and then writing, and drawing fell by the wayside, until somewhere around 2020 when I decided to start again for no reason that I can remember. I got a bunch of pencils and some paper. I started drawing by hand. And then some weeks ago I bought the iPad, and here we are!

I’m not as good as I want to be. A few years ago that would have stopped me from posting anything. “I’ll post when I’m really, really good,” I would have said, thinking that if I was really, really good I might be less afraid of people’s judgement. The problem is, being really, really good isn’t quite the concrete thing a lot of us seem to think it is. People will judge you no matter what, and depending on your personality, it can be difficult to ever think you’re really, really good at things. (This is me. I am this personality.) So there’s no point using this as a benchmark.

No doubt some of you also have this inner critic that deems everything you do some shade of mediocre and unworthy of being seen. Sometimes this leads to working hard and making something great. Sometimes—very often, in my experience working with creative people—it leads to talented, lovely folks squirreling their work away and never letting anyone see it.

It’s a big step to tell this inner critic that its opinion isn’t wanted, that you will share your work, and it won’t be perfect, but it will be a catalog of your progress, and it will be a thing you labored over and did your best at—the contents of your brain turned out for all to see—and that’s excellent.

So that’s what I’ve been striving to do. Below are my first attempts at digital art in chronological order of me making them. (The ones above also slot in here somewhere.)

“To be rescued by the horrible bird priest, or dropped into the pit of poison, that is the question.” -Hamlet

Zita and the Butcher King in the lands of the dead - a redraw of a sketch a did a while back for Cinders and Sparrows

“Dream Harvest”

“Deep in the dark of a white birch wood…”

These are mostly very colorful, which I’m not sure is my thing, but it’s been fun trying out all the various brushes and color options on Procreate. I hope to go back to the more detailed, black-and-white style soon, because it’s my favorite sort to look at. Whatever the case, I intend to post several of these picture round-up posts over the coming year, and I hope that in twelve months I’ll be able to come back to this one and see the difference.

And if you are a person with art, or stories, or poems, or music to share, share it, because it’s worthy and good, and through sharing it, it will become better.

(To finish, here is a time-lapse of the goat person’s creation process.)