Discussion: Different art media

[mekare]

So, a thing I thought about just now, after having done the recent challenge in pastels...

What is your preferred medium of choice? What exactly do you like about it? Is it special techniques or effects that other media don't provide? Is it the haptic experience? Is it the cost? Childhood experiences? Art from artists you admire? The "comfort zone" due to practice?

What brings you to push yourself into trying a less practised/or new medium? (Is it a mood, a character/situation, just variety, inspiration from other artists using that medium ...)

Do you ever play around with a mix of traditional and digital media?

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For example, I just did a smallish pastel drawing (will post tomorrow when I have good light for taking a photo) because I miss working with colour. The format isn't really great for using pastels or even pastel pencils because the medium just isn't so great for detail work. (I think I remember a post by Alby Mangroves, for example, where she had a photo of her works on huge formats. There you can put in detail more easily).

Yesterday I tried using coloured pencils (which I rediscovered for a challenge piece this week) and found that things I do in other media don't work with them). It got a tad frustrating and I wished I had done the art on watercolour paper so I could used those instead.

Media I use (roughly in order of frequence): pencil, watercolour, pastels, ink/felt pens and the like

I'm just really interested in your experiences with or feelings about the different media we have available for drawing.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I am currently very happy with my current system: digital base picture with an overlay of scans of traditionally painted watercolour textures I made myself. I have experimented with traditional inking but like undo and layers too much.

Every now and then I enjoy doing a coloured pencil drawing, there is something very satisfying about the process, but I'm generally not very happy with the result.

I find traditional pencils a bit more natural than digital ones but usually can't be bothered with the hassle of scanning them in so just do my pencils digitally.

[mific]

OMG I know! The number of times I make a mistake with traditional paints and my hand searches for the nonexistent undo button! And layers are very cool, yes. I made watercolour backgrounds too, recently, but for actual backgrounds, not as overlays.

[alias_sqbr]

nods I use them for that too, sometimes. It looks a lot prettier than doing gradients etc.

[minoanmiss]

Your textures really are lovely!

[alias_sqbr]

Thank you!

[mekare]

I sometimes wish for an undo button, especially with watercolour. Pastels are more forgiving, you can layer over them and take them away to some extent. And with pencils, there's always the eraser. Thinking about it, that's probably why they are my favourites LOL.

[alias_sqbr]

Yes my few forays into traditional media generally involve pencils or acrylic paints. I love the look of watercolours but don't have the nerve.