Improving as an Artist

Progress isn’t easy, but it’s always worth it. Long before there were youtube-tutorials, I wanted to create digital art. I was just amazed by the stuff, other artists were able to design and paint with Photoshop or other similar programs like Painter. Drawing was always my greatest passion and in the 80ies I admired fantasy of science-fiction book covers, which showed monsters, space ships or marvelous landscapes. Soon I learned, that those were painted with oil, gouache or acryl, but with the 90ies came the digital revolution and the first artworks entirely created with a computer took my attention. Either in 2D or 3D: the possibilities seemed endless and new styles were developed.

In 2003 I began with my education to become a graphic designer, but I still was very much interested in creating illustrations, also digitally of course. About one year later I had my very first Graphic Tablet in my hands (from Wacom of course) and I did my first steps in Photoshop, sketch and render something on a digital canvas. A friend of mine provided me with some tutorial-videos, which showed me step by step how to use the program and the tools for painting a picture. Everything was selft-taught, no teacher or classmate was interested in this subject or had much of a clou. Of course the basics of anatomy and so on are no different than to analogue art. To learn these is already quite a task on its own.

So with some emberassement I’ll show to you my very first digitally created artwork from 2004. I tried (and failed of course) to imitate one of the artworks from Brom, which is still one of my favourite artists and surely one of the greatest ever. The background is quite simply a photograph from the internet, which I distorted with a Photoshop-filter (which I thought was awesome). I guess everyone has to start somewhere…

I could show you more (and worse^^) of my early days, but I guess this one should suffice. I’ll show you another example though of some significant improvement, which happend within two years. The motive is the same, but the outcome shows some massive difference. With the second one I wanted to test the advancement of my skills and how much I could change the old artwork. Of course I can still learn a lot and I know I can do better, but I am truly happy about my artistic progress over the years…