A little over a year ago I wanted to improve my digital drawing/painting, fight against my perfectionist tendencies, be less precious with my work, and work more efficiently and confidently (I was probably inspired by watching Trent Kaniuga paint).

I created a square canvas with a single active layer on a gray background. I chose a pencil brush for drawing and a paint brush for painting and a single colour (I settled on dark purple). At the start of each day I spent about 30 minutes drawing on this single canvas from memory and imagination. I would take whatever was there from the day before and I would morph it into something else. I eventually began to use some white for highlights and light sources, but I only ever drew on one layer. I drew to get darker and erased to get lighter against that gray background. I came to really enjoy this process and I encourage you to try it. I got some really fun results. I think this is a great way to get back your love for drawing just for the fun of it (if you’ve lost it).

One thing I enjoyed doing was to spend 30 minutes studying some sort of reference, and then another 30 minutes drawing some “morphing art” trying to incorporate what I had just studied into the scene from memory; that was fantastic practice! My digital painting program Krita has a live recording feature which creates a new image with each brush stroke. I would save major points of change to track progress, but a couple times I saved all the images to create a time-lapse video (#MorphingCanvas). Below you will find the bigger milestones of change; there’s too many to include each step. The images are best viewed if you open them in the full-sized lightbox and use the arrow keys to flip through them. Enjoy!

The Morphing Canvas

“Change is the only constant.”

Your Turn

If you do give this a try, I’d love to see what you end up with after a month or two.