60 artists, 21 hours of live drawing

CELSYS organised the Drawing Party as part of Wacom’s international Connected Ink programme.

The event ran continuously for 21 hours, with 60 creators from around the world drawing live in rotating groups of four.

CELSYS selected the participating creators from 780 applications worldwide. The sessions covered different themes and were streamed internationally, with audiences able to watch the drawing process and communicate with the artists through live chat.

CELSYS / Clip Studio Paint — official participating artists & schedule →

The City at Night

The theme for my session was deliberately broad: The City at Night.

I developed it as a small narrative scene rather than a conventional cityscape: a woman and a robot walking past a Parisian café at night, bottle of champagne in hand.

The juxtaposition gave me room to combine familiar urban atmosphere with a slightly improbable character relationship — part romance, part science fiction, part visual joke.

Because the drawing was being created live, the image also needed a structure that an audience could follow as it developed: characters first, then environment, colour, atmosphere and final detail.

Drawing live means showing the process

Live drawing is quite different from presenting finished artwork.

The audience sees the decisions as they happen: construction lines, adjustments, discarded ideas, colour choices and the gradual transition from an empty canvas to a finished scene.

During the session, viewers could ask questions through the live chat while I worked, so the event became both a drawing performance and an informal look at my digital illustration process.

Working in Clip Studio Paint

Clip Studio Paint has long been part of my professional digital drawing toolkit, particularly for line-based illustration, comics, character work and projects where I want the flexibility of digital production without losing the directness of drawing.

For the Connected Ink session, I worked directly on a Wacom Cintiq 27 QHD Touch, drawing on screen in much the same way I would work on paper while retaining the advantages of layers, digital brushes, colour adjustment and an editable workflow.

Being asked by CELSYS to create the entire session in its own software made the production process itself part of the event.

Digital tools, hand-drawn thinking

I work extensively with digital tools, but the underlying process remains drawing-led: composition, line, character, gesture and visual storytelling come before the software.

Clip Studio Paint is particularly well suited to that approach because it allows the spontaneity of drawing directly on the Cintiq while supporting a production workflow suitable for professional illustration.

The same combination of drawing and digital production appears throughout my work in editorial illustration, comics, character design, concept art and animation.

Illustration for digital, editorial & narrative projects

Although this particular project was a live drawing event, the same workflow feeds directly into commissioned work.

I use digital drawing for projects ranging from editorial and educational illustration to business comics, character development, visual storytelling, concept art and animated sequences.

The tools vary according to the job. What remains consistent is the ability to move from an initial idea through drawing, refinement, colour and final production within one coherent visual process.