Christmas Day is almost upon us, as is the final day of The Digital Dream; only two more weeks to go … this week was another fun one, mostly spent doing daily lilSOPHIE affirmations in Clip Studio Paint Pro ... I am in love with everything about this process!

I’ll detail some more of the fun things Clip Studio Paint Pro does below, but first, let’s take a look at this weeks tings :

DAYS 55 TO 61

STUDY EXERCISES

STUDY EXERICISES

DAY 55 • lilSOPHiE AFFIRMATION
‘WHEN YOU RUSH YOU DELAY’
Venerable Phuntsok said that once during one of his Meditation podcasts, and it stuck with me ever since.

It applies to everything in life: creating a piece of art, transitioning from male to female :), doing the day job, even eating your dinner :)

If you ever catch yourself rushing, slow down and remember …

When You Rush, You Delay

DAY 56 • lilSOPHiE AFFIRMATION
‘ALWAYS BE ADAPTABLE’
… another one of those things Art taught me, that applies to the whole of life :)

As Ajahn Sumedho says –
“The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable.
The mind of the ignorant person is conditioned and fixed.”

DAY 57 • lilSOPHiE SKETCH
Pantyhose lol

Something that’s always bothered me, is why do we call them tights in the UK?

Tights is so boring; Pantyhose sounds way more sexy and naughty

Wish we called them Pantyhose.

This one isn’t fully finished, but it’s time for me to get my pantyhose on, ready for tonight’s Life Drawing Class :)

DAY 58 • lilSOPHiE AFFIRMATION
‘HUSTLE WITH KINDNESS’
Couldn’t quite get the text the way I wanted it on this one; needs more squeeze :)

Hustle with Kindness is something I made up, but it sort of symbolises finding balance.

Balance between hustling your nuts off, and looking after yourself

DAY 59 • CHIBI PENCIL SKETCHES
A few pencils sketches from my bus rides to work :)

Three are from the past week, and got turned into digital sketches already

The other one I sketched this morning, and hope to digitally sketch it tomorrow

I love doing these :)

DAY 60 • lilSOPHiE AFFIRMATION
‘I AM IN CONTROL OF MY THOUGHTS’
This affirmation is so powerful; I say it out loud every single day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

It’s one of the things I’ve found most helpful at keeping the lies of the mind at bay. Every time a negative thought pops in, I repeat this and it passes.

I wanted to shrink her down a bit and move the text into a bubble, making it look like she’s thinking the affirmation, but ran out of time :)

DAY 61 • lilSOPHiE AFFIRMATION
‘FOLLOW YOUR HEART’
… it always knows best :)

This one was so different in the pencil sketch, but I couldn’t for the life of me get it to work lol

I was never going to use white line art either, that sort of happened by accident … but I kind of like it :)

CLIP STUDIO PAINT PRO

I said last week how my early impressions were that Clip Studio Paint Pro seemed pretty cool, well, after 14 days with it, I can safely say it is incredible. So many things it does will make you smile, and speed up the process of digitally drawing and painting. I’m going to highlight one more reason why Clip Studio Paint Pro is smart; last week it proved to be smart for reasons related to producing smooth line art, this week, colouring.

I’LL FILL IN THE GAPS

Clip Studio Paint Pro is so smart, so clever, so able to read your mind, that you’ll find yourself having to change the way you think when producing digital art. What do I mean? Well, we’ve been conditioned to think a certain way with programs like Photoshop, but with Clip Studio Paint Pro you have to drop all assumptions.

If you’re sat there thinking, I wish it could do this, or, wouldn’t it be cool if it did this, or, I wonder if it does this … try it, chances are, it will.

An example is colouring. At the moment all my colouring is done on separate layers, a layer for each part. So I’ll have one for skin, one for hair, one for outfit, than another one for accessories and I’ll group all of these layers inside a folder called colouring; it works really well for me.

For the first week however, I was colouring a really time consuming way of blocking in the shape with a big brush, than zooming in and slowly erasing around the edges of everything. This is how I was doing it in Photoshop, I liked the level of control it gave me. In Clip Studio Paint Pro, you can do something incredible. You can fill in the shapes of line art, that are on different layers, without having to use any selection tools or anything. This means, say you draw a hand on one layer, you can create another layer, and using the fill tool, fill in the colour of the hand as if the line art was on that blank layer.

This is cool, but, Clip Studio Paint Pro takes it to the next level.

Say you have 100 layers, a hand on one layer, a glove on another, some rings on one, nail shapes on another, a jacket with holes in that slightly covers the hand revealing patches of skin etc. You can still do this same filling of the shapes, and even if all the line art is spanning 100 other layers, Clip Studio paint Pro will fill in the colour of the area within the line art, as if all those 100 layers are part of the layer you’re working on.

It’s hard to explain, another one of those things I’ll show with screen shoots in a future blog post, but it is incredible. Suddenly, something that was taking me 30 minutes is now done in minutes. In Photoshop you can achieve this with the lasso tool, or other selection tools, but I always found that fiddly, it’s just so much easier with Clip Studio Paint Pro.

There are so many instances like this; I love Clip Studio Paint Pro.

AFFIRMATIONS & lilSOPHIE

The more I do this challenge, the more I know bringing affirmations and lilSOPHIE together was the best thing I ever did; where the thought came from to do this I have no idea, but it just feels like they were made for each other :)

Affirmations have changed my life this past year, and if lilSOPHIE can somehow help spread the power of them to other people, that would be so beautiful. I enjoy everything about the act of making these:

• thinking of ideas
• sketching the little thumbnails on the bus
• bringing them to life on the computer
• finding colours that feel nice together
• trying to capture the essence of the Affirmation in lilSOPHIE’s body language …

I love them, and I hope you do too.

WEEK ELEVEN

The next week saw me come up with lots of ideas for lilSOPHiE moving forward, find out what sort of things in the DIGITAL DREAM WEEK ELEVEN BLOG POST :)