My iPad Drawings

Last Friday, I went on a course to learn to paint on an iPad using the Brushes software. The course was held at V&A and was led by Nadja Ryzhakova. In the morning we started to learn about the Brushes software and it's potential and in the afternoon we set about drawing in the museum on the iPad. I decided to stick to my landscape theme as I thought that would be the most useful to me. Here are my first two iPad drawings. You may (if you squint!) see a resemblance to recent images I posted. 

The image above is the first image I created after exploring the tools in Brushes. Everyone on the course had previously explored the Brushes application with varying degrees of success. Everyone, except me that is because I don't even have an iPad! Maybe with Christmas coming up that might change? Anyone that has an iPad seems to love it but they always seem quite expensive to me, for what they do. Would this be the tool that would lead me to get one? Fortunately the V&A will lend you an iPad for the duration of the course but I might have struggled, if I hadn't previously used Photoshop. 

 

In this second picture, I really tried to simplify the image so that I could explore how this technique could be used to inspire future textile work and it was really quick to create (and it probably shows!).

 

Most of the course participants had been inspired by David Hockney's iPad images and everyone wanted to know how to create their own version. We were told that these images were good to print size A4...maybe A3 but as David Hockney's images were significantly larger than that he must have another trick up his sleeve. Not something for me to worry about just yet, I'll leave that until I have an image good enough to want to print it out large! 

If you would like to see how these digital images can be created, then I recommend that you have  a look at Nadja's YouTube channel. Here you can see how she has built up the images and you can see the potential of the tool much more than you can from my work.

One thing I really like about this method of painting is that when you get to the end of the painting session, there's no cleaning up to do and no paint splashes on you or your clothes. That's definitely worth something.