The person writing all of this

7 years drawing on a screen, writing about it for 3

My name is Olena and I have been working as a digital illustrator since 2017. Most of that time was spent doing client work — character design, editorial pieces, the occasional book cover. Around 2022 I got tired of answering the same questions in DMs and decided it was easier to write it all down somewhere. That somewhere became Davorenia.

The blog started as a way to document my own process. I was switching from raster to vector workflows, testing about 14 different apps over 6 months, and keeping notes anyway. Publishing those notes felt like a reasonable thing to do. Turns out other people were going through exactly the same confusion.

Everything here is based on tools I actually use or have used long enough to have an opinion about. I work primarily in Procreate for sketching and Affinity Designer for final vector output, though I still open Illustrator at least 3 times a week out of muscle memory.

Davorenia is a one-person operation.

That means the writing is slower than a bigger publication, but it also means every article goes through real hands-on testing before I type a single sentence. I do not publish roundups of tools I have never opened. If something takes 40 hours to learn properly before I can write about it, that is just how it goes.

• Procreate
• Affinity Designer
• Adobe Illustrator
• Color Theory
• Character Design
• Vector Workflows