In these days and age of digital, I must admit I sometimes feel a bit lost. As a close to 40 guy, digital was not part of my childhood and I realize a 6 years old child knows more about digital than I do (but doesn't have a clue about tapes and atari video games). I don’t try to escape this digital world and I am even quite active on social media as this is a good opportunity to share, to communicate, and to be inspired. Yet I still listen to analog music on vinyl, and I have ben doing so way before this so called vinyl revival. I also draw without computer and never learned to use Photoshop, Illustrator and all this stuff. On the other hand, I like gadgets and was among the first guys to own the 1st iPhone around me, importing it from the States six month before its release in Switzerland. And, in 2009, I discovered the Brushes app, a drawing software designed for iPhone, really easy to use, and since I always liked to draw small, the screen size of the smartphone didn’t boher me at all. The only issue with these digital drawings was that you couldn’t print the drawings as the resolution was not good enough. But besides that I had a lot of fun with this.
This was later thanks to a drawing software on iPad that I started to get back even more to drawing. Unlike Photoshop or Illustrator, the Adobe Ideas iPad app is really intuitive and easy to use vector drawing software, and I like to use my fingers to draw on the screen, without a pen and digital drawing board, like I was a child doing finger painting. As manual as it may seem, the digital drawings had to be printed in order to be real. I had even the pleasure of seeing my printed artworks exhibited twice and it was really interesting to get feedback about these illustrations. Not only about the drawings themselves, but also about the fact that it was not handdrawn. The criticism reminded me of the one against electronic music : « this is not art. Everyone can do it without training. » Infact, people who knew I used an iPhone and iPad to draw didn’t know how much I am able to draw manually. This is one of the reasons I did some live iPad drawing and let others use the application sot hey can see for themselves how easy or difficult it could be.
I must admit that the simple fact that you can delete things easily, can come back to a previous stage of your drawing is really confortable and I wish I could do that with a « real » drawing or painting. Yet, I like to doodle digitally and make quick and dirty sketches like the above illustration called « Feeling blue » I did in something like one minute. It was printed and is for sale as a 10 piece limited edition forex piece. As it was done on an iPad, there is no real original drawing, the print is the only physical support of the drawing. In fact, in order to own a real iPad drawing, you should buy my iPad, which is not for sale ! But feel free to purchase one of the iPad drawings printed on Forex, contact me for availability .