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?

---------------------------
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

[darthneko]

It's been so so long since I worked in physical media. I still have a ton of it - there's boxes in my office full of old watercolors, inks, markers, pastels, and colored pencils. I've lugged another box full of empty sketchbooks around through multiple house moves. I even have my coveted chameleon pen set (I jumped on one of their kickstarters) out on my desktop, but I only use it very rarely. The lack of an undo function and the knowledge that all physical art supplies are a consumable (and usually costly) makes me twitchy about using them.

My workflow of choice is my ipad pro (first gen) and apple pencil. It goes everywhere with me and I use it for art, writing, and reading. All in one! I've tried a number of art apps and my current favorite is Procreate - the brushes you can get for it are amazing, mostly either free or large packs of them for between $3-$10 on places like gumroads, and it has a lot of the same layers/mode etc functionality of Photoshop. Plus it exports to PSD files, and it actually records every brush stroke you made - you can export a time lapse video of the art when you're done. Since my internet connection is too slow for streaming, at least I can pop time lapse videos up on my youtube. ^_^

[mekare]

I find digital drawing with a tabelt very intriguing bt I just love the haptic feel of traditional materials too much :-) At he moment I am spending my art money there but I'm not ruling out getting a tablet for drawing at some point in the future...