Since my last post I have continued drawing digitally in Procreate and testing how it feels to both pull from and challenge the habits and modes of drawing on paper.
I’m finding myself distinctly enjoying drawing digitally. As I said in the last post, I am using an Apple Pencil on a ~10 inch iPad. I applied a Paperlike screen film which adds a very subtle “tooth” so that the Pencil feels less like hard plastic on smooth glass.
I’ve started using some digital brushes like simulated halftone patterns which I have used lightly in the past on paper usually in the form of collaged elements. But in their digital form they can be any colour and shape so they feel more like a loose screen printing than collage.
I’ve continued using the same digital page size and format which is equivalent to a landscape 8.5 x 11” Letter page. Many of my drawings on paper are more tall than wide so this orientation has been interesting especially with the various grid forms I’ve been experimenting with.
Part of maintaining a consistent page size has been the growing idea that I may take these images and create a zine/book from them. I don’t want to yet assume that’s what I will do because it’s not a primary goal at this point. I’m still drawing these to feel how it feels to draw them.
I haven’t found a lack of emotional outlet in working this way. Despite the dense scribbled and layered nature of my work on paper, there has always been a balance or a boundary in place when I make them between emotion and a more rational connection to drawing.
The same is true digitally. I can be feeling light or heavy things and I don’t feel less able to express them just because the medium might be assumed to be colder or more rational.
I can draw from anger and the digital result doesn’t feel tempered to me. Any controls or limitations are mental and not a result of the format.
I’ve had positive reactions from a few people to these recent drawings and a few people who know my work on paper have been surprised that these are digital. That says something about the current tools but is also obviously because I have been intentionally working digitally in a way that draws from and means to extend my “traditional” drawings.
I think the main thing I miss in making these drawings is the physicality of my arm in motion. The scale of these drawings and the function of the Pencil as an input device limits what I can do with my arm. This does have an effect on the drawings because the forms and their motion within the frame are confined. But missing that aspect is fine since I’m not trying to replace one form of drawing with the other, just pull at the threads between them.
I’m curious how other artists feel working between digital and physical. I know some people hold a bias that digital work is a lesser form — in part because the artifacts that remain of the work are always a copy or never truly exist. They can be printed to become physical but only as a facsimile or reproduction.
I haven’t printed one of these drawings yet. I have a feeling that their nature will change without the benefit of the radiant nature of art on a screen.
They may turn dull and lifeless in a physical form which is an interesting twist on the assumption that digital art is without some life force assumed to be inherent in physical art forms.