Loish (Lois van Baarle)
Defined the modern digital character-painting style. Teaches online to thousands.
The Maker
If this is you
You want to make art with computers. Tablets. Code. New tools. Whatever's next. This lane is for the kid who learned to draw on an iPad and isn't going back.
Practice Studio
Pick one. Then build it in six stages.
Ten references, all drawn here — a mug, two cylinders. Choose one and the lesson walks you from blocked-in shapes to a finished drawing. Print the blank grid; the drawing happens on paper, not on the screen.
0 / 6 stars
Before you close this.
Which stage was hardest, and what would you do differently next time? Answer that out loud to somebody. That question is where the lesson actually sets — not in the drawing.
Techniques that stickread when stuck
The centre line goes down first.
One vertical through the whole object. Both ellipses hang off it, both sides answer to it. A lopsided mug is almost always a missing centre line.
The bottom ellipse is rounder than the top one.
It is further below your eye, so you see more of it. Draw them the same and the mug looks flat. This one rule fixes most beginner cylinders.
Frame it. Nine squares.
A handle is a hard shape until it is just "the curve that crosses square six". Grid the reference, grid your paper, work one square at a time.
You probably already...is this you?
If this is you
You probably already...
You're The Maker if you've ever:
- Learned to draw on a tablet before paper, and felt fluent immediately.
- Watched a digital artist's process video and wanted to be them.
- Cared about brush settings, custom palettes, layer modes.
- Thought animation, 3D modeling, or game design felt like the SAME skill as drawing — just with extra tools.
The Maker's superpower is tool fluency. Software stops being in the way. You speak its language. Your output can scale from a daily Instagram sketch to a finished short film to a print run to a video-game asset. The tool isn't the art — but you know your tools cold.
Exercises and what you needdo these
Three exercises to start tomorrow
Pick one. Do it.
Step 01
30-day daily digital.
30 days, 30 small digital pieces (10-30 min each). No big projects. Just hand-and-tool fluency. By day 30, the software stops being in your way.
Step 02
Color palette swap.
Take a black-and-white drawing. Color it 5 different ways with 5 different schemes. The digital advantage: you can do all 5 in under an hour.
Step 03
Custom brush set.
Build 10-15 custom brushes that feel like YOUR hand. Each one solving a specific problem — skin texture, hair, foliage, fabric. Your brush set IS your style.
Tools sized to your lane
What your hand asks for.
📱
iPad + Apple Pencil + Procreate
Modern illustrator default. ~$700-1300. Used by working pros.
🖥️
Krita (free, desktop)
Open-source, pro-tier. Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Right starting point if budget matters.
💻
Wacom Intuos (~$100)
Cheapest reliable desktop tablet. Works with everything.
💾
Backup system
iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive. Losing 200 unfinished pieces to a dead drive is preventable.
📓
One physical sketchbook anyway
Stay limber on paper too.
Artists in this lanelater, not now
Artists who walked this lane before you
They’re not the only way to do this. They’re evidence the lane exists.
Kim Jung Gi
Drew anything from memory. Live-drawing demos that broke the internet.
Cory Loftis
Disney art director. Zootopia, Encanto. Modern digital + traditional warmth.
Beeple
One digital piece per day for 5,000+ days. The discipline of daily work.
Where this style came from
Object drawing is where craft and design meet. Every chair, phone and pair of scissors you have ever used was drawn like this first — a real thing, described accurately enough that someone else could build it.