I’ve taken up a digital art program this month (Clip Studio Paint) as part of a big project I’m working on with a friend. Drawing on my computer makes it so much easier to make a lot of drawings in a short amount of time. While I’m pretty much committed to sticking to traditional art for my scuba blog, I wanted to experiment with this zine project I’m running and create a digital banner.
Sign Ups open November 1st, 2026 but you can check out the info and sneakily sign up a little early if you’d like by clicking the link at the bottom of the zine description:
Theme: Dream Job
Sign Up Period: November 1-30 2026
Submission Period: December 2026 – February 2027
This season’s theme invites you to interpret dream job as literally or as abstractly as you wish. Tell us what you wanted to be when you grew up, however mundane or fantastical it might be. Tell us what you wish you could be doing for a living right now, if you had all the time, money, and training in the world. Maybe you already have your dream job? Maybe your dream job doesn’t exist yet– show us what it would be. Maybe your dream job is a fantasy profession! Maybe you could explore dreams and work in a more figurative sense… it’s up to you!
Submissions are open for writers, artists, and musicians. There are no fees, portfolio requirements, or other restrictions as long as you are at least 18 years old. This is not for profit and open to all. You do not have to follow the account to participate.
I love riding horses. I don’t get to do it often enough, so there’s a lot I still need to learn.
Tux, the star of the show!
Horses are complicated creatures in terms of drawing. They have odd proportions, lots of weird angles, and some difficult shapes compared to other animals. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to draw horses all my life, and it was only in this year (2026) that I told myself, “I’m going to figure out how to draw these animals correctly!”
Horses are one of those subjects that are notoriously difficult to draw. You know you’re looking at a great artist if they can draw a good-looking horse. Maybe I’ll get there eventually.
I did not fall off the horse. But I felt like I was going to fall down when I got home, I was so much in pain. Galloping on a horse involves a lot of core, back, and leg strength– things I don’t have much of– so I got a full-body workout.
Ouch! Well, it was worth it. However, I think I’ll need some time to rest and heal before I can go on any more adventures. I’ll dream of horses and the beach until then.
I ran a discord group for artists and put on monthly events. As an example, some of our more popular events were Secret Santas, where each person would be assigned to secretly make a gift for another group member. It’s been a lot of fun.
September 2026’s event was a Tutorial/Skill Demonstration exhibition, wherein participants were asked to make a tutorial on a skill. I get a lot of questions about how I freehand drawings so I focused on that for my demonstration. The Discord app isn’t great for sharing videos and big files, so I’m borrowing my little website for this project!
For my friends coming from the Discord group: hello!!
Alright… let’s get into it.
When I draw, I often only use pen with no sketches. I put the pen directly to the paper– but what’s happening in my mind isn’t all that simple. It’s actually a little hard to describe my thought process (but I’ll do my best).
The photo above is of a ceramic dragon, and I decided to use this as my reference. Something that’s really important for me, since I don’t use pencil sketches, is having a reference image. While I can draw some things from memory, having an image to draw makes the process so much easier.
My first step often involves mentally blocking out the space I want to take up on the page. Is it going to be a full page drawing? Will the drawing be very small, only taking up a corner of the page? For this exercise I didn’t worry too much about placement because I’m not drawing anything else. I have to take space into consideration particularly when I’m drawing comics.
I like to think of freehanding with a reference image as mentally tracing . I took a photo of my dragon, and overlayed lines to try and show you how I think of the image as I’m drawing it. Later, you can watch an actual video of me drawing the dragon!
I basically always start with the head, if the object has one. I try to think of the object as though it has layers– what needs to be drawn first so there are no overlapping lines? The dragon here has a lot of layers: the wings overlap, the dragon is sitting on a castle/rock and the body overlaps the scenery, one claw is holding a gem/pearl, etc. Stuff like that! I have to consider what to draw first and how, depending on how many things cover or overlap each other.
I know some people start from the bottom up, or from the feet to the head. I do the opposite, because in my opinion blocking in the head first lets you get the proportions of the rest of the body to be more accurate. If you know how big the head is, you know how big the body should be.
The arm serves as a sort of anchor point for me. I can use the arm as reference to start drawing the rest of the body and the castle. You have to pay attention to the little details, like gaps! The yellow line is the bottom of the throat, and it creates the top of a little opening or gap that shows the background.
Nice! The body is mostly blocked in. Now we can use that as a size reference to draw out the castle/rock outline.
There’s so much little detail that will need to be added, now that the basic lines are down…
Now that I’ve shown you approximately what goes on in my mind, let’s see how I put it into practice!
This summer, I did try incorporating pencil sketches into more of my drawings and it’s really helped me draw better… but I’m a horribly impatient artist, so I’m still mostly freehanding haha!
And here is the finished piece, after cleaning it up a little:
