Fellow Travellers is an ongoing series of pictures from my travels and people on similar journeys as we get from A2B. The drawings begin as smart phone pictures which are good documents of reality, but never quite capture the atmosphere and focus of travellers and so I began using my waiting times to begin the process of digital drawing. Drawing with pencil on paper is a truly rewarding tactile process, but so is digital drawing, which might have the added benefit of being portable, easily shared and like so much of digital technology democratise the image.
Experimenting with drawing apps that claim to be like the real thing I eventually came to a simple ideas app that offers pencil, pen and brush tools, layering and a rubber : adobe ideas.
From simple black and white line drawings to more tonal images that best use the size, weight and vector brush qualities of digital hand drawing. I feel am developing a range of techniques to create drawings that capture ‘being in transit’. I use my finger which creates a human digital interface and brings drawing closer to hand eye creation. The tablet has similarities to a sketchbook in that it can be maneuvered and drawings can be quick and responsive, but can also enable longer term refinement of an image when returning to dryland and have some drawing time.
The final images are digital and can live on the web, be viewed and shared, but it might be valuable to have them on paper in the analogue world. Quality digital photocopiers are becoming the norm and are good for printing out into the physical world, which maybe just fine. However there may be another stage to this journey where the digital images could be printed out on to quality paper using traditional hand cranked machines and print making methods using metal, stone and ink to transfer drawing to paper and creating bespoke images. That may provide another picturing quality I’ve not met before.
