Nene Thomas

For the first 10 years or so of my career I painted exclusively in watercolor, with a touch of acrylic on some pieces.  In 2004 I became enamored with digital art, and the more I began to like it, the more dissatisfied I became with my own paintings.  So, I set aside my watercolors, bought a digital art tablet, Corel Painter 7 and Adobe Photoshop CS and began experimenting. It was a lot more difficult to learn than I assumed it would be, especially because I do not have a lot of experience with computers, so I spent countless hours surfing the internet looking for any and all digital art tutorials that I could find.  My first digital paintings were actually hybrid works, where I mixed watercolor elements with digital ones, but eventually I became comfortable enough working with the digital art programs that I completed the transition to fully digital works.  Now I do all of my work digitally, from the preliminary sketch to the finished product, and when I look at my watercolor art compared to my digital art, my watercolor pieces look unfinished to me somehow, almost as if they are color studies.