I’ve been thinking a lot about my use of digital tools to create art. The odd thing about my practice is that I try to mimic traditional media as much as possible in my digital drawing practice.

Sometimes people wonder why I use digital tools — and I have a couple of reasons.

First — the speed of production. I’m able to quickly rearrange things for clients when necessary, and being able to make changes incredibly fast has saved me several times when making last-minute changes to a tattoo design.

Second — it lets me make 10,000 mistakes very quickly and with no wasted materials. Learning a skill means making mistakes and learning from them, so if I’m using a pencil “brush” on a drawing display to mimic a traditional pencil on paper, I can screw up quick, learn from it, undo it, then try again.

It’s like Josh Waitzkin using an e-foil to practice front-side turns on a lake 10,000 times before he takes his hydro-foil out on the waves. I can get in more reps than a traditional artist if I use my digital tools correctly.

And so, here’s my digital warmup page:

I went on to do some 30-second gestures and some 5-minute sketches, recalling the methods Steve Huston uses to construct gestures along with the Mike Mattesi FORCE methods:

Followed by some visual notes on a Steve Huston video

What went well?

• A fairly smooth morning. I had fun with gestures.

What needs work?

• My afternoon got derailed again, but I did a tattoo!

What did I learn?

Ability and potential are two very different things. I feel like I’m doing work to the best of my ability (within the constraints of reality), but not living up to my current POTENTIAL if I had full focus on the task(s) at hand.