I started University last fall, and I used that as an excuse to get a 2018 iPad and an Apple Pencil. I had to take notes, after all, and why not do it digitally? The university thing didn’t last, but something else happened after a month or so: I started drawing.

I wasn’t that into drawing as a kid. Sure, I doodled just like everyone else, especially at a young age, and I do remember doing at least one pastel drawing, but that was about it. Hell, I was not much into visual arts either, or so it feels like, with the notable exception of photography. So it surprised even myself when one day, on a whim, I paid $10 for Procreate and promptly spent the next few days glued to my iPad and drawing every waking minute of the day.

A few months before that, I did a series of portraits at XOXO 2018 and they felt like a natural starting point. I started tracing these photos; open them in Procreate, set the opacity to around 50% or so, create a new layer, pick up my virtual graphite pencil and start drawing over them. I think I did about a dozen of these; you can find some of them on my Instagram. Looking at them months later, I think they don’t look too bad for a newbie.

Tracing felt like cheating — even though I know it’s not — and the next step was to find something or someone to draw. I was already aware of a place in Budapest called Painters Palace, a great art community that has weekly figure drawing classes. It’s full of amazing people, and they have a fantastic space.

I fell in love with figure drawing the very first time I did it. Drawing the naked human body is may not be the easiest thing, but it’s loads of fun. It didn’t take me long before I started modeling as well; I did it twice so far, and I plan to do it more in the future. My Instagram has a few early drawings posted, and I started posting my huge backlog to my art account.

Another thing I started doing was drawing hands from reference images. I have a couple of these published so far with at least one more to come.

There is some irony in the fact that even though I do almost all my drawing digitally, I use pencil and charcoal and I’m consciously trying to make them look like analog drawings. That being said, I don’t have much desire to use “real” pencil and paper, at least not right now.

All in all, it’s a great outlet for creativity and I’m very happy I discovered it.