I thought drawing on my iPad would be simple enough for a book cover

Spending way too much time in the app store

I really thought I could just download a free illustration program and start making a cover for a web novel I have been tinkering with. I spent about three hours scrolling through app store ratings, reading comments from people who sound much more professional than I am. Most of them kept mentioning Adobe Illustrator, but that monthly subscription fee is just not something I want to commit to when I am not even sure if I will finish this draft. I ended up trying three different free alternatives. One kept crashing every time I tried to use a complex brush, and another had an interface that felt like it was designed in 2005. It is kind of funny how we assume that if it is ‘free,’ it must be easy to pick up, but the learning curve on these tools can be pretty steep if you have never touched anything besides basic photo editors.

The reality of the pen tool

There is this specific thing with the pen tool that just doesn’t click for me. I tried to trace a simple flower illustration just to get a feel for the vectors, but I ended up with these weird, jagged edges that looked nothing like a professional graphic. I kept wondering if I was doing something wrong, or if my iPad screen protector was making the friction feel weird. I remember seeing a notice about a workshop at Wonkwang University where they were teaching portfolio skills using industry-standard software, and I honestly felt a bit jealous. It must be so much easier to have someone standing next to you saying, ‘no, move that anchor point this way.’ Doing it alone at midnight, drinking lukewarm coffee, I just kept deleting my work and starting over. I think I spent two hours just on one petal.

Looking for shortcuts that don’t exist

I started searching online to see if there was some automated way to convert my rough sketches into clean AI files. You know, like one of those magic buttons that turn a messy JPEG into a crisp vector. I found some forums where designers were quite blunt about it, essentially saying, ‘no, you actually have to draw it yourself.’ It was a bit of a reality check. I kept thinking about the ‘Hoyoland’ events where people show off such polished fan art, and I wondered how much time they actually put into those pieces. It is easy to look at a completed book cover or a character design and think it just flowed out of their hands, but I am starting to suspect that 90% of it is just the tedious process of cleaning up lines that weren’t quite right the first time.

The cost of free materials

I saw an advertisement for a local district center, something like a ‘one-day class’ for emotional character illustration, and it was listed as free of charge. I thought about signing up, but then I realized it probably meant I would have to commute across the city for a three-hour session where I would spend most of the time waiting for others to catch up. Sometimes the ‘free’ stuff in life actually ends up costing you more in time and logistics. I have a stack of messy drawings on my tablet right now that I haven’t touched in a week. I don’t really have a plan for them. I thought I would be done with the cover by now, but looking at the files, I feel less like a designer and more like someone who just wasted a lot of battery life on a device that is supposed to make things easier.

Maybe it is just not meant to be perfect

I am still debating whether I should just buy a monthly pass for the more robust software or keep struggling with the free tools. Part of me thinks the frustration is because I am trying to make something look like a high-end web novel cover when I am still essentially learning how to hold the digital pen correctly. There is a part of me that wants to keep going, but there is also a very strong part of me that wants to just close the app and never look at a vector file again. I suppose the final product might just end up looking a bit ‘handmade’—or, if I am being honest, a bit sloppy. For now, I think I will just close the laptop and leave it for another day, maybe when I have a bit more patience for the pen tool.