Illustration by Dr Samuel Lam from his book “Complementary Fat Grafting”- Chapter 4
Fortunately, this book required far fewer drawings than my previous ones since it only covered one topic, and I could use the same illustrations with overlays to convey different teaching points. I started out using only Adobe Illustrator but found that to convey facial volume effectively that Illustrator was simply not equipped to do that well. Accordingly, I made some investigations and found a program, Corel Painter, paired with a Wacom tablet that allowed me to be entirely liberated as an artist. Using the Wacom tablet, I could tilt and push the pen like a brush and create over 200 levels of pressure points and different degrees of drag as I moved my pen across the tablet. I could even use oil (which I did for the face), acrylic (for the hair), and watercolor (for the lips), something that would have been impossible in real life. Also, as anyone who works on oil can tell you, drying time is terribly long. With digital oil, I could set the drying time to immediate or return the condition to semi-wet or wet, which is amazing. I was also able to then blend the features of Corel Painter for softer, artistic renderings with the hard-edged communication advantages of Illustrator. In short, it was a fun, creative exercise working with digital painting.
