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

[amberdreams]

When I got back into arting, I wasn't confident enough to use traditional media even though I had no clue how to use digital either. So my early fanart is all (bad) digital manips and messing about with layers and effects. I did get better at it but then I decided to pick up a pencil again after digital drawing in GIMP and PaintTool Sai. So now I regularly draw in pencil then photograph the drawing and digitally colour it, which mostly works well.

Then a couple of years ago I went back to re-learn traditional stuff. I painted a pig - a giant fibreglass sculpture for a trail in our town, and then discovered there are trails all over the country that anyone can enter designs for. So since then I've painted an otter, two bears, a lion, a hare and a giraffe, and am waiting for a giant bee to arrive in the next week or so. The giraffe was the hardest, being 2.5m tall... Painting is done in acrylics, though I can't say I'm exactly good with them.

I've also started a sketchbooking course (been doing it for a few terms now) and we are using all kinds of traditional media, and mixing them up - watercolour or gouache over acrylic, lots of experimenting, which has been very challenging! I admit, I'm still most comfortable with a 2B pencil. And digital is still my go to, especially if I need to do something quick, because the ability to undo and to draw in layers is makes life SO much easier.

So why I'm trying to do an actual acrylic painting for an upcoming convention I don't know. Heh. Though maybe painting all these giant animal sculptures gave me a false sense of confidence LOL

Yeah, basically I'm still learning, on all fronts.