The birth of "Damian"
It all started with the decision to learn cartooning a couple of years ago. The road to this decision has been long and winding, however, I came across the DaVinci Cartooning Course and signed up.
The course is a 100% online excercise and conducted with a combination of forums and photo sites. You get weekly assignments through a forum and feedback from the teacher and your class mates via the forum, too.
So I started drawing cartoons daily. Daily? Yes? The idea of the DaVinci course is, that you should budget 15-30 minutes of drawing each day. Some days I drew for longer. Cartooning is a matter of practice. But compared to learning an instrument or some foreign language, cartooning is a whole lot of fun and it became the perfect outlet for the daily spat at work.
In the very beginning I drew circly cirles with a pencil on paper, then copied cartoon characters with color pencils on paper and practised and practised. After a while, during the second or third level of the course, I started to develop my own cartoon character: “Damian” was born.
In parallel I started figuring out a worflow of drawing digitally. I tried out almost everything from scanning pencil sketches and colouring them im Photoshop with a Wacom tablet, over drawing with a Bamboo Pencil on digital paper until I came across my beloved iPad Pro and my Apple Pencil.
Today I’m drawing on the iPad only. I’m using Adobe Sketch as an app because it is extremely user friendly and it allows to use layers – as in Photoshop. For “post production” I transfer the sketches as layered PSD files to the PC and finish them in InDesign or Photoshop.
