Technical Process

My current, primary body of work is colored pencil drawings created by digital means. The pieces are created in Procreate on an iPad. If this digital medium wasn’t nearly indecipherable from the physical, I would’ve abandoned it. But in fact, it mimicked the material attributes of my colored pencil drawings on Mylar while removing its barriers. 

I customized an out-of-the-box Procreate “Brush” to replicate Prismacolor on Mylar (polyester film). Apple Pencil’s movement across the textureless screen echoed my hand’s experience working on Mylar. 

Mylar’s milky translucency semi-obscured graph paper grids and photo references, and stencils quickly replicated geometric shapes. Procreate’s “Guides” and “Layers” (with decreased opacity) simulated these structural inputs. 

Procreate houses over 16 million colors, so I restricted choice by building custom palettes with RGB values matching my 150 Prismacolor pencils. With these preset palettes, I begin my work, later expanding beyond them as the drawing develops.

Previously, entire sections had to be erased if something didn’t work on Mylar. Procreate maintained Mylar’s lack of surface memory, and “Layers” separated marks from each other – allowing greater detail without loss of work from erasure. This feature also reclaimed my embroidery technique where a new element was sewn under an existing stitch, mitigating the need for stitch ripping and resewing.

Below are two 30-second timelapse videos of drawings built within Procreate.