2026-07-14
What My First Year of Digital Illustration Actually Looked Like
A month-by-month look at the real stumbles, small wins, and turning points that most beginners never talk about.
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Specialist Interviews
Conversations on digital illustration05
Direct conversations with illustrators, art directors, and educators who work in digital media daily. Each interview surfaces practical knowledge - tools, decisions, and honest accounts of what the work actually involves.
05 Published interviews
12+ Topics covered
2022 Series started
3–8 Min read per piece
All interviews
Perspectives from practitioners - no abstractions, just specific experience.
2026-08-30
My Digital Portraits Looked Flat for Two Years and Here Is the Specific Reason
An honest breakdown of one recurring technical mistake that kept portraits looking lifeless, and the exact moment I understood what was wrong.
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2026-02-19
A Timeline of Every Color Mistake I Made in Digital Illustration
From oversaturated nightmares to muddy palettes, here is how my understanding of color actually developed over three years.
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2026-07-21
Texture Brushes Did Not Fix My Digital Illustrations and Here Is What Actually Did
A specific account of chasing the wrong solution for eighteen months before finding the real gap in my process.
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2026-02-18
Returning to Digital Illustration After Quitting: What Was Different the Second Time
A specific look at what changed between a failed first attempt and a second attempt that actually stuck, including the one mindset shift that mattered most.
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About this series
What these conversations are actually about
Digital illustration sits at an intersection of artistic instinct and technical decision-making. These interviews ask practitioners to describe that intersection in concrete terms - specific software choices, workflow problems they solved, and the moments where theory met a real deadline.
The questions are prepared in advance but the conversations stay open. Guests from Kraków and beyond bring different working contexts - some teach, some work in commercial illustration, some focus on personal projects. That variety is intentional.
- Guests describe tools and techniques they actually use - Procreate, Clip Studio, Photoshop workflows
- Honest accounts of learning curves, not polished success stories
- Accessible to beginners, detailed enough to interest experienced illustrators
Recurring themes across interviews
Certain questions come up in nearly every conversation - these are the areas where practitioners most often have something specific to say.
Software and hardware setup
Which tablet, which app, and why. Guests rarely agree - and those disagreements are more useful than any single recommendation.
How a personal style develops over time
Most guests describe style as something that emerged gradually through repetition and constraint - not a deliberate design decision made at the start. Understanding that timeline helps students set more realistic expectations for their own progress in digital illustration and Gardening and Landscape Design-influenced visual work.
Client work versus personal projects
The tension between commercial constraints and creative freedom appears in almost every interview. How practitioners manage that balance - practically, not theoretically - is one of the most useful things this series covers.
Questions for the next guest?
If there's a specific aspect of digital illustration you'd like to see addressed - a tool, a workflow challenge, a career question - the contact page is the right place to send it. Suggestions do influence what gets asked.