Digital Painting. Digital Drawing.
What's the Difference?
FACES . EXPRESSIONS . SYMBOLS . ICONS
DRAWING . TOUCHSCREEN PAINTING ON iPAD, iPHONE OR GALAXY NOTE
Digital painting and drawing
are two quite different experiences
What exactly is this difference between digital painting and digital drawing?
When you are painting, you lay down the pixels one by one like a tapestry.
When you are vector drawing, you click and drag to make lines, shapes and fills which are recorded mathematically.
MOUSE-POWERED SCULPTURE
With vector drawing, instead of tracing a fine line, you are dotting down points and pushing and pulling at small handles to alter angles. That's why vector drawing is not too difficult to do with a flat-footed mouse. It may even have evolved with that blunt instrument in mind.
Vector drawing feels more like sculpture than painting.
...BUT WHAT WAS WORRYING THE OWL?
I doodled an owl on a Pocket PC I had in the heyday of the PDA. My Pocket PC used vector processing. Good for office tasks like handwriting recognition, perhaps, but unpredictable for the inexpert doodler.
The owl was garbed head to foot in glorious purple provided by the Fill bucket in Pocket Word.
...Then of course he was synchronised to the desktop and back, along with everything else. He acquired an off-the-shoulder look in the process.
On making the round trip again, the bird acquired an even more trendy costume - and exchanged his contact lenses for a pair of designer sunglasses.
If you'd rather a little less excitement in life, making a screen grab of your vector drawing will convert it to a bitmap and preserve it as intended.
TIP: In many tablets and smartphones, you can make a screen grab by pressing the Home and On/Off buttons simultaneously.
Graphics tablets and styli are not too common in an office setting, but vector graphics are good for lettering, diagrams and charts you can fix with a mouse.
Major desktop paint and photo apps like Photoshop and Painter are bitmap editors. So too are many major mobile apps for tablets and smartphones. These painting apps handle photos and provide inspiring simulations of art materials. However, an increasing number also allow you to do some vector drawing. Even if you have a steady hand and the latest Wacom tablet, this is still handy for making circles that don't look like potatoes, squares that are square, and fancy type.
SYMBOL DRAWING a skill you never lose
DIGITAL DRAWING AND PAINTING
GIF or JPEG . Draw or Paint . Keep enlarged pictures sharp
DIGITAL DOODLING THEN AND NOW
Palms . Pocket PC. First camera phone
(c) Valerie Beeby 1998 - 2012
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