My Journey of Becoming an Artist
By: Margaret Maynard-Reid
Tags: Drawing, Digital Art, Illustration, Art, AI

My Journey of Becoming an Artist

For the past year, I studied art fundamentals, learned how to draw and paint with traditional media and digital tools. As an ML engineer, I have been exploring how to use AI for art and design, which has become my focal interest. This is the story of my journey of becoming an artist.

I created an online gallery: margaretmz.art with AI generated art and artwork I created in traditional media or with digital tools. You can browse and filter my artwork by categories and tags, and I will be adding new ones.

margaretmz.art, image by the author

AI art

With the assistance of AI, everyone can create art now: with a press of button on your phone camera, or simply draw with your fingers. AI is also integrated into many of the existing software tools, for example, Adobe Photoshop and Snapchat.

Other examples include auto draw, neural style transfer and using GANs to generate or transform images. In addition to helping hobbyists to make art, AI can also provide professional artists with inspiration, which is an important aspect in art making.

Through open source project collaboration, I have designed and created Android apps that can transform photos into anime or cartoons and apply artistic effects (to image background).

Cartoonized self-portrait, image by the author

Digital art

The digital tools today make the artists life so much easier: from drawing perfect lines and shapes, making color pallets, automatically fill color, customized brushes with special effects, to AI powered effects and filters.

Here are the digital tools (software and hardware) that I currently use or have explored in the past: Procreate, iPad Pro 2020 with 2nd gen Apple pencil, Wacom Tablet, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, Paper by We Transfer (previously 53), SketchBook, Inkscape, and Paintbrush.

Earlier this year, I started working with Procreate with an Apple Pencil on iPad Pro and absolutely love it! I took several classes from female portrait illustration, flat illustrations to watercolor painting.

Protip: Try different styles and tools but eventually develop depth by focusing on just a few.

Experimenting with many different types of media, styles and tools will broaden your skills. Ultimately to learn something in depth, you will need to choose and focus. Once you figure out your favorite styles and tools, dedicate your time to perfect them.

Digital paintings, image by the author

Traditional art

There are lots of digital tools today that make the artists life much easier; however, to make good art, you still need to understand the fundamentals such as proportions, perspectives, lights, shadows, and colors — tones, contrast, brightness etc. You still need lots of practice to develop your ability with good intuition, eyes for observation and how to express emotions with colors and so on.

Protip: I recommend learning the fundamentals if you have the time and interest. Start drawing with just a pencil and a piece of paper.

Here is my analogy of creating art to coding — the art making apps and software are like your IDEs, the customized brushes are like code libraries that make your life easier. You still need to learn the programming language and the computer science fundamentals.

Drawing with pencil on a piece of paper, is like coding deep learning algorithms with Python without any frameworks to help you. Doing so will help you understand how things work under the hood.

Last year I took an evening art class “Basic Drawing: Right-Brain Method” at Bellevue University. We followed the text book called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. My teacher was excellent and I enjoyed the class very much.

Each session went from 6pm to 9pm. I was so surprised how much I enjoyed spending 3 hours drawing with just a pencil on a piece of a paper. The only “enhancement” was an occasional graphite stick and smudging with a paper towel.