Prissy Kitty coming along, even though I was busy doing a few freelance gigs today

Fiverr.com is keeping me really busy with app reviews. I love that computer geeky stuff, too, but I felt a little weird the past few days to not have much time to work on drawings.

So tonight at 11:00pm I blocked out a little time and no pressure to make a little progress on my sleek cat drawing idea that I started recently.

Cat looking a little more colourful after 20 min

I feel good that I made some progress. I still need to define in my mind how elongated I want her to be, and what kind of muscle tone I want to portray. I'm definitely leaning towards the clay sculpture look that I love so much.

Thoughts about transitioning from traditional to tablet drawing

While working with Corel Painter for this drawing this evening, I discovered a pastel drawing tool that feels very much like traditional Pan Pastel. It was Real Soft Pastel brush. I managed to get a real soft imprint as though I was using a sponge with Pan Pastels, especially when holding the pen in an overhand grip.

This pen grip doesn't always work with the graphics tablet, and works a lot better if you tilt the tablet so that the pen is making adequate contact at an angle. It effectively makes you notice how your whole arm is moving, rather than just your wrist. I prefer to not rely on my wrist, as I'm looking for soft, sweeping movements of course for my kitties.

I don't see any discussion online so far in my travels about how to transition from traditional drawing methods to a drawing tablet. I don't really want to give up my spontaneous and freely-moving arm gestures; a lot of comments online about Wacom tablets indicate the users are adopting a handwriting grip when using the pen.

I'd love to hear opinions on how people hold their drawing tools, whether pen, pencil, brush, or digital tools. Even my drawing books don't address this much, except for the one I'm currently reading. It's called Drawing Basics and Video Game Art by Solarski and it goes into some good detail about how to hold a pencil in various ways for drawing.