IMAK SmartGlove

Hello again! It has been a while since I’ve painted anything on the iPad so here I am with another piece. Of course, there was a trigger to my desire to start painting on the device again, and it all starts with a wristguard that I purchased after seeing my coworker wearing one to give her wrist comfort while using a mouse and keyboard. When I use my stylus to write or draw on the iPad, I usually find that my wrist gets detected on the screen so that my hand and my stylus end up fighting for control. I usually found myself having to elevate my wrist to avoid this complication. To prevent my wrist from accidentally writing something on the screen, I got an IMAK SmartGlove. It is very comfortable and has beaded padding to support my palm area. Now when I use a stylus, I can comfortably rest my wrist on the iPad without having to worry about it being detected by the device. It makes writing and drawing a breeze! This, of course, inspired me to do another piece since I had a new level of comfort.

As with a lot of my artwork, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to make when I started this new painting. I started messing with blue and violet hues and created a nice twilight/night sky background with a starburst as the focal point. Because the colors reminded me of a magical Disney scene, I decided to create a fantasy-inspired piece. A fairy would be the focus of the painting and she’d collect flowers of some sort (of course, I didn’t know what kind of flowers yet; I figured this out as the painting progressed).

The design process

Sketching the fairy wasn’t too difficult, although I found myself having to redraw her left leg three times to get the length, angle and proportion right. After that, I filled in her skin tone and started adding shadows to give her some dimension. I then added her hair. Doing her face was actually a rewarding challenge. I found that I didn’t have the contours of her nose, chin, and upper lip right, so I had to erase and redraw parts several times before being satisfied that my fairy was “pretty”. Once I finished her face, the rest was pretty easy. I added her wings next, given them a glittery gold feel, and then added a trail of pixie dust to suggest her magical abilities. At this point, I decided to have dandelions be the flowers that my fairy is captivated by. I chose them because the seed head phase of the dandelions looks so magical and as a child, I remember finding them in the wild and making wishes on them as I blew the seeds into the wind. After painting the flowers, my painting was done. The entire piece took 8 hours to complete over three days. See the result below:

Dandi The Fairy