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February marked a noticeable creative shift in Alison’s daily digital sketching practice, moving away from simply producing finished illustrations and toward recording the process itself. By capturing every mark, erase, and adjustment, Alison began creating animation-style sketch videos that reveal how each digital artwork evolves.

This process-driven approach transformed her digital art workflow, placing equal — and sometimes greater — value on experimentation, mistakes, and mark-making than on the final image.

I created these works using a universal capacitive touchscreen stylus. Its compact size and ultra-fine tip make it particularly well suited to detailed digital sketching.

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A Creative Transition From January to February

In January, Alison’s focus was firmly on learning the digital medium. She familiarised herself with the stylus, built confidence with her digital tools, and settled into her chosen sketching software. The month was about dipping her feet into digital drawing and developing technical comfort.

By February, however, her goal changed. She began actively using the screen-recording function to document each sketch from start to finish. The creative task became less about delivering a polished illustration and more about capturing the rhythm of the drawing process itself.

This change introduced a new, animation-like quality to her digital practice and opened up a fresh way to share her creative journey.

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The first successful recording focused on the creation of a green heart. Developed alongside a Valentine’s Day article, Alison deliberately avoided the traditional pink colour palette and instead explored a fully green, nature-inspired approach.

The heart was constructed using:

• multiple tones of green
• a custom floral stencil to build a vine-like structure
• layered spray tools to create depth
• lighter and darker shades to define form and texture

Rather than presenting a smooth, romantic motif, the illustration embraced organic shapes and layered mark-making. The recorded video revealed how the heart gradually emerged from repeated stencil passes and tonal adjustments.

A 10-inch tablet offers the perfect balance for digital sketching, providing enough screen space for detailed work while remaining portable and comfortable to use for informal evening sketch sessions.

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Lord of the Flies Inspired Digital Illustration

Another key video project was created to coincide with the BBC’s mid-February broadcast of Lord of the Flies, adapted from the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

The novel remains one of Alison’s favourite books from her school years, and she continues to explore similar literary themes through the work of George Orwell.

This illustration featured a pig’s head mounted on a spear — an instantly recognisable visual reference for fans of the story. Alison combined:

• a loose, live-drawing style
• multiple transparent layers of digital watercolour
• subtle pink and flesh tones
• soft, atmospheric blending

One of the most engaging elements of the recording is that the video captures mistakes, erased sections, and corrections. Harsh white “voids” created by the digital eraser are later redrawn, allowing viewers to see how decision-making and problem-solving shape the final image.

In this piece especially, the recorded process takes precedence over the finished depiction.

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Food Illustration Study – Fruit Still Life

A lighter, more playful recording followed with a fruit-based still-life illustration.

The composition featured:

• grapes built from grouped, textured circular marks
• blueberries dotted in irregular, organic clusters
• deep purply-black tones for blackberries, finished with small highlights
• strawberries layered with reds, yellows, and greens to suggest surface texture

Dots, short strokes, and clustered marks were repeatedly used to construct form. Subtle shadows were added to ground the fruit and enhance realism.

The resulting image feels almost edible, but once again, the real focus lies in watching how the marks are applied, layered, adjusted, and refined over time.

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Why Process-Based Digital Sketching Matters

A key success of Alison’s February practice is how clearly the recordings reveal:

• trial and error
• evolving ideas
• changes of direction
• and the gradual development of confident mark-making

By prioritising the creative journey rather than the finished outcome, the videos offer valuable insight into how digital illustrations are truly built — layer by layer, mistake by mistake.

This approach also supports deeper learning and reflection, helping to identify which tools, brushes, and techniques best support expressive digital drawing.

Alison looks towards Painter 11 Creativity, Digital Artist’s Handbook for sources of inspiration and how to be more fluid with pixel manipulation.

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What’s Next for March?

Looking ahead to March, Alison plans to continue focusing on recorded digital sketch videos rather than static finished pieces.

The upcoming themes will introduce more spring-inspired subject matter, including:

• new growth
• flowers
• and a broader seasonal colour palette

This will be combined with further development of process-based mark-making and experimental drawing sessions accompanied by classical music — encouraging rhythm, flow, and expressive movement in her digital sketches.

February has clearly marked a turning point in Alison’s digital art practice, establishing video-led documentation as a powerful creative and reflective tool for her ongoing artistic development.

For readers interested in developing similar processes to those Alison has used Introduction to Digital Painting is a great place to start, it’s online and on demand.

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