I’ve been banging on for too long now about how I firmly intended to try out some life-drawings on my iPad just as soon as I got my tablet-drawing technique up to speed. Having belatedly realised what a classic cart-before-horse attitude this was (how do you get the speed up without first doing the drawings? Duh.), I took the sainted device along to Tuesday night’s session at the Arts Club.
Earlier in the day I warmed up with a quick (about 30 mins) sketch of Seasick Steve, done in the Brushes app. Not from life, in case you were wondering:
Most of the poses (with Laura modelling) at life class were ten minutes or less, which is just fine with a pencil but still a little bit tight for me on the iPad. I worked conventionally for the first half, then went digital for the second and below are some of the results. The two techniques make an interesting contrast:
The two iPad drawings shown here were produced with different apps. The back-view on the right was made with Brushes and the figure on the left with a recently-purchased app by Adobe called Ideas. This is a simple but extremely elegantly-designed vector drawing app that is marketed more as a tool for getting visual ideas down quickly (the clue’s in the name) than as an art package but it’s a joy to use, has lovely built-in line-smoothing and I reckon has real potential for general sketching. Both these drawings were made in far too much of a hurry and as a result appear very scrappy but I’m including them here in the hope that things will improve over time and they can be referred back to as a useful benchmark. Or should that be base-camp?
Drawstring 
Lovely stuff, mate. Drawing directly onto the ipad is a bit of a challenge but it’s looking good. i like that smooth line you got and it’s always great to try new techniques as you are constantly surprised and excited by the results. Can’t wait to see more. I’m getting jealous already of the easy access to classes in Brighton. Cemmo
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Far too soon to be suffering withdrawal symptoms, Paul! Yes, the iPad experiment was great fun but there’s still a lot to learn – I’ll definitely be doing more of this, the apps are great! Have fun in the sun!
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