Digital art
The drawing and painting apps for iPad and iPhone are exciting new artistic media with great creative potential that have opened a new era in digital painting. I have been working with this new media for about three years and it is not an understatement to say that it has revolutionised my creative process.
Initially I saw this as not much more than a portable digital sketchbook in which ideas can be captured quickly and in full colour. However, when David Hockney exhibited a room full of iPad prints, each one 6ft high, at the Royal Academy of Art in London earlier this year, the full potential of what is possible with this new media started to be unveiled.
By utilising the latest in printing technology these images glowed from the page, transferring the quality of a backlit screen onto large sheets of archival quality paper in vibrant colour.
One of the obvious advantages of drawing on an iPad or iPhone is its portability, meaning it can be taken anywhere at any time, making it ideal for open air landscape drawing, or drawing whenever there is a spare moment. Another unique advantages of drawing with an iPad is that at every stage of the creative process the image can be saved, duplicated and worked on top of. This enables great creative risks to be taken because every good stage of the image can be saved while the artists pushes the image further and further. The speed of drawing enables very complex visual ideas to be worked through and resolved in a few hours, whereas on a canvas this might take years.
There are many drawing and painting apps available, each one with different functionality. My favourite is called Brushes. This is easy to use and is hugely powerful in terms of the complex images that can be created, and in terms of the resolution at which they can be printed. The iPad enables images to be exported at a massive 122 megabytes, which in theory means they can be printed at the size of a house without any loss of resolution.
Suffice it to say this is a serious piece of kit, a cross between a pocket sketchbook and a portable art studio. I am now never without it.
You can watch two of my digital paintings taking shape in the videos below.
Initially I saw this as not much more than a portable digital sketchbook in which ideas can be captured quickly and in full colour. However, when David Hockney exhibited a room full of iPad prints, each one 6ft high, at the Royal Academy of Art in London earlier this year, the full potential of what is possible with this new media started to be unveiled.
By utilising the latest in printing technology these images glowed from the page, transferring the quality of a backlit screen onto large sheets of archival quality paper in vibrant colour.
One of the obvious advantages of drawing on an iPad or iPhone is its portability, meaning it can be taken anywhere at any time, making it ideal for open air landscape drawing, or drawing whenever there is a spare moment. Another unique advantages of drawing with an iPad is that at every stage of the creative process the image can be saved, duplicated and worked on top of. This enables great creative risks to be taken because every good stage of the image can be saved while the artists pushes the image further and further. The speed of drawing enables very complex visual ideas to be worked through and resolved in a few hours, whereas on a canvas this might take years.
There are many drawing and painting apps available, each one with different functionality. My favourite is called Brushes. This is easy to use and is hugely powerful in terms of the complex images that can be created, and in terms of the resolution at which they can be printed. The iPad enables images to be exported at a massive 122 megabytes, which in theory means they can be printed at the size of a house without any loss of resolution.
Suffice it to say this is a serious piece of kit, a cross between a pocket sketchbook and a portable art studio. I am now never without it.
You can watch two of my digital paintings taking shape in the videos below.
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