Depending on what you have in your hand, drawing takes on a particular character, and more to the point, so do you as the maker. I had my HB pencil and a straight edge poised when I sat down on Northampton Street. I figured they would provide me my best hope of capturing subtle shifts of contiguous surfaces, planes starting in one direction, morphing into another, confounding all perspectival rules of thumb. But as you can see, I got seized up, anal if you will, and after an hour plus, my patience was exhausted.
The iphone is another matter entirely. Driven by the selection of app, it is either quite intuitive and clumsy (DoodleBuddy) or cumbersome but deft (SketchbookMobileX). Its appeal as a drawing tool I’ve alluded to before, mighty convenient and internally smart (becomes one of your photos instantly). Sketchbook Mobile is versatile with great variety of line weights, but time consuming choosing and dialing up of thickness, ultimately distracting from the formal issues at hand.
DoodleBuddy, my preferred iphone drawing tool, is far more forgiving, but extremely limited in options. Slide your finger along a diameter spectrum for line width, tap for color selection, and you’re off.
Touch is not an issue – you can tap, strike, or caress; the iphone considers them equals. Leaning into a line, or feathering an edge, impossible. It’s either on or off, there or not, pink or canary. Nuance manifests in the guise of DoodleBuddy’s smudge tool. I’m sure there is a technical description of what is really going on inside its chip, but here, with the smudge tool, is as close as you get to making mud pies.
1 comment:
thanks for starting the blog again -- always loved it -- and the drawings bring back so many memories!!!!!
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