I love digital art but one of the things I DON’T like is how easy it can be to undo anything and everything. There’s an easy eraser tool, the undo button, a liquify setting where you can liquify and move around your artwork with a little brush. And of course there’s layers where you can layer things on top of each other and easily erase from one layer, leaving the others fine….

This all can be viewed as AMAZING. And I find it so amazing and helpful too….most times. As someone who’s been making traditional art my entire life, I like the classic way of paint or a pen where you CAN’T fix your mistakes. Even erasing a pencil line on real life paper doesn’t make the paper entirely white again.

I’m a perfectionist so the easy fixes on the digital art program Procreate can be very tempting and sometimes I’m clicking them over and OVER again. But then I don’t get that feel of art with mistakes and blemishes and the trail and error.

So, today I challenged myself to make a digital art piece without the undo button, NO eraser, NO liquify, none of the tools AT ALL I would use to remove something or “Fix my drawing.”

I will share my results and my process with you in this post! Here’s how it turned out!

In this drawing I REALLY wanted to have fun with shadows so I gave her a long shadow of a window on her neck and face. Behind her is a starry night sky, fireflies darting in the air. I tried to make her eyes as emotion filled as possible. The tear gave a bit more emotion to it, but I think what really gave it all of that emotion is the small pupils shrunk in fear.

At the beginning while I was sketching, the process was HARD. Sketches always seem like the hardest for me and I always want to get them perfect. When I’m sketching normally, either on paper or digitally, I’m always erasing things. But not today! Heres how the sketch turned out:

I definitely changed things a lot once I started painting. The painting and coloring of it was my favorite part. Usually when I’m digitally painting I don’t use the undo button THAT often, so this part was more enjoyable than the sketch! But I still wanted to undo stuff SO bad but I fought the urge. Things I wanted to change I had to go back over with color, kinda like in traditional painting!

I first gave her reddish/brown hair, but it didn’t feel right, so I changed her hair to black instead, like in the final version!

(First black hair style I did, then I changed it for the final version)

As you can see, there’s some random paint swipes I accidentally made, but I wasn’t able to remove them until I painted the background due to my main rule. I wasn’t sure one bit what I wanted this background to be…at first I painted this weird one that I didn’t have any clue what it even was:

But finally I decided on the background the final version has!

This piece was so much fun to make and such a fun challenge I’m gonna do more often!

Thank u for reading!!!