This is the first entirely digital Smith cartoon, drawn using ‘ProCreate’ on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. As you can see, the lines are a bit looser and more painterly, as I haven’t quite got the pressure curves on the pencil quite right yet, and the glass surface I’m drawing on doesn’t have the same amount of resistance as a sheet of paper, so the pen tends to skitter around more than I’m used to, but all in all, I think it’s not bad at all. The black and white artwork, once finished, was save as a .psd file, ported over to my iMac using Dropbox and then coloured using PhotoShop as normal.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to go completely digital yet – it’s taken me two months to get to the stage where I could consider attempting to draw this one but you’ll see digitally produced strips turning up every now and again. And when it gets to the point when you can’t tell the difference between an iPad drawing and a pen and paper one, then, we’ll be ready for the switchover to a completely digital workflow.

One neat thing about ProCreate is that it records your drawing while you’re doing it, and lets you export a video of the drawing process. Here you’ll see my first fumblings with the program – importing the grid structure in the background, drawing one set of frames at the wrong size, erasing them and starting again, pencilling, lettering and, finally, inking. Enjoy!