Practice. LOTS OF IT!

Least for me it was that. As I had to force my brain to shift gears from traditional to the fact that what Im doing is no longer down in front of me under my hand. But now in front of me on a screen and NOT under my hand. Just keep dabbling with it. Accept that it wont go smooth and look great this early in the game. Just push to do something and complete it. Hit up Ytube for pointers and tricks and dont be ashamed to ask anyone you know thats a solid digital artist.

I figured it would be practice. That's what it took to learn the programs I now use at work. My sense of time scale for the past few years is off so what I think happened a couple of years ago actually happened more like five or six while other events from some time ago feel more recent. So I tend to forget that it took me a couple of years to get pretty fluent in those programs.

I guess I expected to take right off on this because I've had a lot of experience using a tablet at work but the nature of the work is different and I have to grant myself that that difference is the key here. It's likely that once I overcome that, things will get faster.

Off-topic, but I love your new avatar. Is that what you drew in your time practicing?

No, that was practice with my former tablet that I attempted back when I was still learning to use a larger one at work. I think I did actually do the sketch digitally and paint it entirely digitally. I didn't know near as much about digital work then as I do now but what I do know is a bit different than what I'm trying to learn right now.

I'm actually practicing at coloring a sketch I did of My Little Pony's Gilda a while back. Her head is slowly taking shape, emphasis on the slowly.

In my case? 30 years as a Mac jockey... :D

Is that back in the Apple IIe days? I think that's what was out when I started trying to seriously learn to draw and not just copy things out of a how to book or photos I found in newspapers and magazines. Graphics must have been tough back in those days. They seemed primitive enough in the computer graphics class I took on the Commodore Amiga back in college, where everything being created looked like it belonged on a Nintendo.

Yeppers! I started out on a friend's Mac 512e... :D

That's like ancient Mac history. Though I fixed the disc drive on our school's Apple IIe a couple of times, I was never allowed to use it. Those of us in the high schools were relegated to the Trash, um, TRS-80s instead. I didn't get to use a Mac until the model that eventually became the Mac Classic came out. Then it was only to borrow it. My brother hogged it playing some game that was like Castlevania I guess. I just remember the little starfish looking guys with hands on a couple of the points that went "Ninini!" until they yelled "YEOW" when you hit them with stones.

The first Mac I owned was an SE with a whopping 4 megs of memory and a gigantic 20 meg hard drive...

Cost nearly six grand in today's money...

There's nothing quite like being nearly rich if only you lived in some time back in history instead. Or nearly a god with the right people and technology at your disposal.

I remember when the 3.5" floppy discs came out and everyone was astounded that they held 1.44 Mb of information instead of 800 Kb like the really floppy 5.5" ones did. I also remember how people figured there would never be anything better than that. If only I could have shown them my 32 Gig flash drive or 1 Tb external and those are nothing special these days.

Yep!

You're remembering the disk sizes wrong: The 5.25" floppies were 360kiB, (180kiB if single-sided), it was the early 3.5" ones that were 720kiB, (MSDOS), or 800kiB, (Mac).

It's been so far back I can't even remember that stuff correctly.

Yes, it will take hours to start with - I think I mentioned in-stream at one point that art that took me 30 hours in 2011, similar pieces now take me six to eight. That's five years of practice in that specific tool and learning what shortcuts work for me, and what tools are the fastest way to get the visual result I want (for example, pairing "crayon/chalk" with areas of flat "ink" for lightly textured blended colours, but using the paint roller with the oil brush for heavily textured blends and taking advantage of how the oil brush "picks up" pigment as well as laying it down...)

One thing to keep in mind - try not to compare your times with people who have been practicing the tool and techniques for longer than you've been doing digital art overall - just keep in mind how long it takes you to do the first image - and how you're able to speed it up for the second :)

Logically I do know it will take time but there's that part that thinks it should be easier just because I can do something kind of like this a lot faster. I did learn a couple of shortcuts just this morning for the two main tools I've been working with for the flat color so that will help speed things up and perhaps that will satisfy that one part for a bit.

Logically I know that too but I was already doing the comparison even with the graphite pieces though that's like comparing apples with a t-bone steak or perhaps even play-doh. I've already gotten a bit faster at doing a few things if I really think about it and I didn't actually start really using the program until yesterday. I do think the second picture will be smaller though if I can help it.

i guess ia lot of practice most of the artist use sai if you use a tablet for drawing i guess you can do it to if you practice some with and look for some tutorials as well

I did watch some tutorials I found on YouTube but didn't find them very helpful. Several were speed paints which were fine to see the work taking shape but it didn't give me a sense of how long things actually take to do. And I didn't get a very good view of what tools were being selected if the tool palettes were shown. I've since watched a number of streams, including one by dragonsintheattic with the specific program I'm trying to learn right now, most of which I've been able to see the entire workflow in several different programs and very different art styles.

Well practice make the master you should try practicing something simple like cube or sphere with shading well just saying

I don't do well with the simple exercises like basic shapes. I learn better by doing something that's actually something, perhaps because it is that much more difficult than basic exercises.

How about trying to make digital one of your old works??

That's what I've been working on since yesterday. I'm coloring a sketch I did of Gilda the griffon from the My Little Pony show. After I'm done with that, I'll probably try one of my own characters that I have some familiarity coloring before.