In 2006, I bought a Wacom Intuos 3 and started experimenting with digital art. By then, I’d had enough of designing business cards and websites; I was determined to find work specifically as an illustrator.
This was the very beginning of the digital artist community in Russia. We shared our work, faced criticism, and occasionally met up for joint sketching sessions.
For some reason, I tried to make my digital pieces too precise and detailed—an approach that only distanced me from true art. I wasn’t skilled enough for actual realism back then, and overworking the pieces usually made them worse. Still, that was my process at the time.
Occasionally, there were also sudden returns to analog media, like gouache.
