Making Digital Artwork To Help With World Building

I’ve always been an artsy person. I’ve always enjoyed painting, drawing, and coloring. Growing up I was always excited to go to A.C.Moore and beg my mom for canvas and paints or a new sketchbook. I was always pretty mediocre at the hobby to be honest. But I didn’t care. It was fun. Somewhere along the line though, I walked away from the hobby. It was a combination of finances and confidence. As I grew up I realized my skills were limited and seeing my friends and those I admired be so much better at it than me and give way less effort was disheartening. I still have some paints, a few old sketch books, and a paint brush but I hardly ever use them.

But I have been tinkering with digital art more lately. Personally I think I’m worse at it than physical drawing or painting, but it’s fun. I’ve been using a free digital art program called Krita for all my painting and drawing. It’s pretty user friendly and there’s lots of resources on reddit and Youtube for tutorials or advice when I’m stuck. I’ve tinkered with it in the past but have tried to improve my skills lately because I want to make artwork for my short stories and book. I’ve been building my world of Hollow Mortes and because my writing takes so much time and not everyone enjoys reading, I wanted to give visuals for people to engage with. Now like I said, I’m far from a great artist. But hopefully my mediocre artwork is enough to get a few more people interested and looking at what I’m doing.

I find that drawing and digital art helps with my world building by not just providing a new medium to enjoy the world, but it also acts as a way for me to visualize what I want the world to look like. When I struggle to write about what a city or a meadow looks like, drawing it sometimes helps with forming description. I need to think about what the grass looks like in the field, and if there are flowers or trees, if so how many and what kind or color. How tall is the grass and how many petals does each flower have? How tall are the trees and what animals or monsters live within or around them? What color are the roofs in the city? Does it have walls for protection or is it out in the open, sprawling like and thinning out the further from the center you go? What are its streets like? Are they tight and narrow like Philly, or broad and flat like Austin? Is there public transit? What does that look like? So many questions that need answering and sometimes simply sketching it out helps form the idea before I try to form words. Drawing and painting is just another form of storytelling. It makes you curious about the world and what you’re seeing in a way that words sometimes cannot do. You look at a piece of art and you think about each stroke of the brush, charcoal, or pen. You wonder why they rooftops of the city were made bright red and why the city has a massive tower in its center. You wonder what life in a city like this would be like. You wonder why it has walls and why there’s nothing else in the picture but meadow.

I want my world to be immersive in different ways. I want people to be about to see Hollow Mortes as I see it, whether they read my work or raise an eyebrow at my mediocre drawing skills. I’ve recently finished the rough draft of my first short story set in Hollow Mortes and am working on the next draft. The rough draft was 22 pages long and I am 4 pages into the new draft. I’m hoping this new draft doesn’t take long but until then I will continue to provide small updates on my progress, goals, setbacks, and achievements in this journey of becoming a writer. If you enjoy what I’m doing and would like to see more, please consider subscribing, leaving a like or comment, or checking out some of my mediocre artwork on my Gallery page of my website. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it.

Thank you!