Fresh Tomatoes

Made digitally with Procreate by Elisha Vel

Fresh Tomatoes 🍅
By Elisha Vel
made digitally with Procreate

This digital illustration of fresh tomatoes was made in July 2021, yet it remains to this day the top favorite digital art that I’ve made so far. It’s just a simple still life but it took me almost 7 hrs in a span of several days to finish it, all condensed in this 1-min video.

This process video is highly sped up, but I slowed it down in some parts to show how I render a tomato and its leaf. It’s also to show that this art is human made.
In this day and age of the rise of AI, I feel it is relevant to say that all the art I post in this account is human-made not AI-made.

At first glance they may look like they’re made traditionally with pastels, but they’re really made digitally with pastel brushes by MaxPacks. If they didn’t have that pastel look, they may have looked like real tomatoes. I like that juxtaposition of realistic but also painterly.

🍅 About The Art

These fresh tomatoes were initially intended to be part of my Breakfast Food Series of digital illustrations. But then, the tomatoes ended up too realistic to fit in with the illustration style of the series. I didn’t intend it to be that way. To be honest, I was surprised with how good it ended up. It was the first time I made something this realistic.

My Breakfast Food Series inadvertently showed the progression of my digital art skills, which culminated in this Fresh Tomatoes illustration. Since then, I have transitioned to traditional art and painting. Maybe my sense of accomplishment of overcoming the challenge of digital art, helped fueled in me a desire to conquer traditional art too. (I also really miss mixing colors by hand with paint, rather than with digital color scales.)

🖍️ Digital and Traditional Art

I love both digital and traditional art. Although, I do more traditional art lately, I still haven’t stopped drawing digitally. One day, I will finish my Breakfast Food Series… or maybe even re-do it? Why not? It’ll be fun to redo it both digitally and traditionally.