✨iPad Pro 2020 12.9" & 🍎 Apple Pencil 2 unboxing + Drawing my Outfits on Procreate 👚🌈 By Ivna Lins

I got an iPad! So I thought I could make a fun video to celebrate it. Yaay! Let’s get this bad boy out of the box, shall we? By the way, I don’t really keep up with the keynotes or anything, so I didn't know they were about to release a 2020 version right when I bought it, so I’m really curious to see it. I watched a few videos on YouTube and I already want to buy the accessories for it. So let’s do this. The box is so heavy, imagine it’s a scam and I got like, I don’t know, a brick. Yeah… that’d be bad.

It's a really nice brick though. I wanna start out by saying that this is not a review or anything too technical it’s just my first impressions and a video made with the sole purpose of me cringing about it later on in life. I believe the greatest change for this new model is the fact that the Apple Pencil now attaches magnetically to the side of the iPad while also charging right there. The other pencil used to be quite visually disturbing to charge, so... Thank you, designers? (Speaking in French) I added this matte paper-like film and I cannot really compare it to the actual screen because I didn’t even get to use the screen itself naked, I just started using it already with the film applied to it.

And what I can say is that it’s just… perfect. I love the feel, the texture, the sound… It just makes everything much more enjoyable. And I also have to add that it was a pain to put it, I did not do a good job it was very annoying. Okay, cool. Time to try it out.

I did two tests before this video, playing with the brushes making a little set with the ones that I liked the most, both for sketching and for my current style of painting. Now we go to the actual drawing part. I chose to fit my favorite outfits in this video. I myself watch many lookbooks and outfits videos here, so I find it so inspiring to see other people’s styles and how they mix and match pieces together. It can be a good source of poses and references to draw from as well.

I’m going with the simple HB pencil for my sketches. To be honest, I’m still a little bit confused with the feel of the pencil, I haven’t grasped how to control the pressure the way I want so this first few drawings were kind of funny to me. In general, I was learning how to use Procreate as well, so I kept clicking on the wrong things all the time. Like trying to find my way around, I felt very messy. But anyways I think it’s time for me to say that the iPad truly surprised me a lot.

I’m a declared avid Wacom user, I have been using drawing tablets for more than 10 years now and I was like “No, how can anything come close to drawing tablets, they’re made for that a tablet is a tablet, I don’t even like tablets”. And that is true, I don’t like tablets UX. I don’t really want portable workstations and I find it very annoying to have to charge it all the time. But all of these grumpy statements were successfully diluted the moment the Apple pencil touched that matte screen Procreate canvas. I just went from a very skeptical cranky human to a... "Oh my God, I love this so much, I never wanna put this away, I wanna draw until 1:00 a.

m. " Yeah, teenager me is laughing but present me is thinking that this is a very very bold move. Anyways, my workflow continues pretty much the same as drawing in Photoshop. I like to do some sort of a tight sketch, lower the opacity of that layer and go over it with lineless painting, grouping together pieces that have too many parts, like the face, the overalls or the background. Then I finish with some occlusion shadows/draping, but very very lightly just kind of to separate the planes a little bit.

I’m using dry media brushes, like a mix of colored pencils, gouache and pastels. Now, you might be thinking: “Ivna, why would you be so narcissistic to the point of making a video just to draw yourself four times? Isn’t that obviously too much, girl?” And yeah, it could be, if you frame me like that but, to be honest this is a very very humble call for a nice discussion that is the fear of a blank page with canvas. Sometimes when we buy new art supplies, like sketchbooks or a new watercolor palette, we sit down to draw and we have no idea what to do. And I’m saying this totally from personal experience, of course. We look at the page a thousand times, we think of many many subjects but it just doesn't feel right.

It doesn’t feel like it’s worth it to even start that thing. Now that I’m saying it out loud, it sounds really dramatic. Why is our brain so dramatic sometimes? I mean, it’s just a drawing, chill. But because it’s coming from our heads, we need to understand what’s going on before we can solve it. Personally, when I look at a blank canvas, I keep thinking: “Oh, I gotta do something pretty or something cute, something that looks like one of my drawings from before, that fits in my style something that proves me that I can draw well, that I’m not a fraud or that shows me that I have some skills.

Also, I cannot just draw anything because it has to have meaning because I like meaningful things and I cannot draw the things that I draw all the time because, well, we have to get out of our comfort zones, right? Comfort zones are bad, they’re, like, something to avoid always or I’ll be this mediocre artist always doing the same things. " Oof, oh, boy! Do you have any of those thoughts too? Yeah, when I say it out loud it sounds a little bit ridiculous that I even think that in the first place because, then again, it’s just a drawing, so I’m not supposed to have that many feelings about a drawing, that’s crazy. Eh... Am I crazy? Are we all crazy? Nah, we’re just letting our brains do their thing. It's like they wanna protect us from spending energy with something that might fail.

I get it, brain, I love that you want to protect me but I kind of need to do this. Okay? Just, just let me do it. Okay, now, seriously now, we have these feelings that go overboard sometimes and it's okay, that's what makes us human and makes us do so many great things. But when we don’t take care of the path our brains take with those feelings... Well, we just saw where it takes us, even with very small things like drawing on the first page of a sketchbook.

So next time you look at a blank canvas draw lines without just start thinking about it. Like, draw a circle, I don’t know, anything! Then draw the thing that you draw all the time. If it’s girls, draw a girl. Or cats, or plants, or butterflies… I don’t know, or bicycles. Okay, I don’t think anybody draws bicycles, right? Yeah… no.

I changed my mind completely about comfort zones, like, completely. I used to be so trapped in wanting to do better work to always branch out and to try to study more, to better my techniques, to know everything that there is to know, even though that’s really impossible. But I’d be there, spreading myself too thin every time I sat down to draw. And, as you can tell, it was not that much fun because I was so self-conscious about drawing that the joy was pretty much all lost in that. Yeah, I still had that flow state where I could draw for hours but at the same time I would always be thinking about the grand scheme of things.

Like: “Yeah, this was fun but what is this even for? Like, is this good enough? Does it show my abilities? Does that express what I want?” Like “It’s this hand real enough? Does it look realistic? Are people gonna find the tiny mistakes I erased a hundred times and think that I’m a bad person?" Huh, guys, negative spiral again, huh. So you know what I do now? It sounds super super simple, like almost condescending but I draw whatever I want. If I want to draw 349 girls on cute outfits, I do that! If I want to put faces in every single thing, I do that too. I still don’t feel like drawing bicycles but if I wanted, I would. Whoa! So brave! And it just changes everything.

It makes me draw more and have less anxiety about it and because I draw more, I practice more, so my drawing muscles are stretched all the time. Before, like a few years ago, I’d make two serious study drawings a month and if I ever had to make a commission, for example, I would be so scared and tense about it. It didn’t feel natural, it felt like… It felt like I would spend so much energy and maybe it’ll all go to waste. “What if the client doesn’t like it? Or what if I can’t draw this hand the way he wants? Or what if I can control the watercolor and I mess up the painting completely?" Yeah, lots of “What-if’s” and terrible ones. Like, they would totally consume me.

Nowadays, I draw simple happy things pretty much every day. So if it comes a time for me to actually draw something more serious and professional, I’ll just start it. Yeah, just like that. No more “what-if’s” forever trapping me. Yeah, they still come, of course, there is no perfect state.

But they come a lot different. “What if the client doesn’t like it?” Well, I’ll make another version with adjustments. “What if I can’t draw the hand?” I’ll look up more reference pictures and try 50 more hands if I need to. “What if I can’t control the watercolor?” I’ll start it all over again, it’s okay. It’s not that painful anymore because I’m drawing so much more I feel like I can tackle more things.

It doesn’t feel like I’m spending too much energy now or at least it feels like I can handle more and that’s my point. Like, forget the whole quality over quantity thing. Would you rather have two good drawings a month and then feel insecure about your art? Or have 30 drawings a month and feel totally excited about your art journey? And, by the way, 30 drawings beat two in every single aspect. If you draw 30 times more, your drawing muscles will be just ready for fighting much better, than going to the gym just twice. And you know what else? With drawing more you get to understand yourself better.

If you’re consciously trying to see why you like the things you like and noticing the patterns inside your comfort zone, you will grow. Yeah, you will grow inside your comfort zone which is what we’re told is contradiction. If you think of your comfort zone as the things you like, there is a lot to learn about the things you like, so just draw the things you like. Like, don’t worry about it being the same subject, worry about learning something new with it. Maybe you want to try a different brush, different linework, different color palette, different medium, different proportions, backgrounds… All while drawing girls, for example! There is so much to do.

And so what if you’re drawing the same things? Have you thought about the people you follow and the people you like? We followed them because they have like a world of things to draw all the time. A style is somewhat a repetition of a couple things and we still love them. I don’t think it’s possible to draw the same way forever. We’re never the same person, like ever. We go through phases and so do our drawings.

And it’s okay, as long as you’re learning and having fun, this is a good journey to be living. And we live our best lives when we feel good in our journey. When did I start getting so deep? I don’t know but I truly wanted to tell you this. I want you to be less and less scared of facing blank pages and, therefore, draw more and more. I’ll put the philosopher me to the side a little bit and go back to what I’m doing.

The usual way I work is sketching digitally to take advantage of all the moving, scaling, perfectly raising, and all that. Then, I’ll print it to either marker or watercolor paper and render it traditionally. What I love about this method is that I have zero worry with my drawings. Sketching is so much fun because I could just literally change everything so easily and if I mess up my painting, I could just print it again and try something new. I mean, of course I’m not super chill like that.

My brain is always wanting to find room for perfectionism and worry somewhere but slowly I’m calming it down and learning to find peace while making art. Isn’t it beautiful, to find peace when making art? It seems like in every video I find something I want to tattoo on my face now. Not a good trend, I don’t want tattoos on my face. Anyways, this is today’s video. I hope you enjoyed it and it made you feel a little bit better.

I truly enjoy talking about the mindset of art-making, so if you enjoy it as well, I hope you stay. If you’re looking for more content like this, I have a few blog posts and I’m also releasing a newsletter full of resources, articles and my personal experience so I’ll leave a link down below if you wanna join us. And that’s it, I’ll see you in the next video, bye!.

Source : Ivna Lins