When I acquired my first iPad a few years ago, things changed. It seemed pointless to carry all these books when I could write, draw, read and play with my iPad. So I gave up buying the newspaper and got an online subscription. I started buying ebooks, and eventually I gave up my beautiful red leather diary and switched to a digital journal. It seems that giving up a sketchbook would be even easier. Because you don’t just carry a notebook, you carry ink pens and cartridges, bundles of coloured pencils and erasers, watercolour brushes and paints and little pots of water.
But for years, every drawing app I tried left me frustrated. David Hockney creates masterpieces with the Brushes app, but all these apps had one thing in common: Every paint mark looked like something a computer had made. The results were lifeless. Until Paper. 53’s digital sketchbook was basic: a limited number of colours and brushes, no layers. But oh, those lines! Finally I could make rough and ready pencil lines and blodgy watercolours. I could just draw without having to first define line width, opacity, radius, intensity…
Art school drummed into us to ‘push the material’. My first acrylic painting was rubbish. I discovered that my iPad was just another medium. It was just like learning to use oil paints. I needed to practice.
I first drew with my fingers, moving on to cheap Chinese styli. I have bought some expensive styli, but found them no better. Recently 53 released the Pencil. It replicates a real pencil: I flip over the pen to use the eraser, I smudge with my fingers. The perfect combination of analog and digital.
Recently I have been asked to make drawings for other people. My Tumblr gets regular feedback, whereas my old sketchbooks sit in a box in the spare room as they have always done. Without the paraphernalia of analog sketching I am liberated to perch in front of a painting at the museum, whip out my sketch book on the Tube, draw in bed. I draw more. I get better. And I make my mother proud.
