It’s taken a while, but I finally bought an iPad2 at the end of last year. One of my favourite Apps for drawing and painting is Procreate. I’m still pretty new to it and am finding using a stylus a bit like drawing with boxing gloves on. The features are very intuitive and easy to use however, so it’s just practise that is needed in order to produce more fluid results.
Of course painting on the iPad isn’t the same as the real thing, but it can still still help with practising techniques such as building up in layers and edge control. Sometimes I sketch objects from life (such as the bronze hare above), and sometimes I copy paintings from Julian Merrow-Smith’s book “Postcard From Provence”. This is a perfect format to make master copies from as it contains nearly 150 still life and landscape paintings that are all reproduced actual size, which mostly happens to be perfect for the approx 8″ x 10″ dimensions of the iPad screen. This means that I can place the book and iPad side by side and work loosely sight-size. It’s my {admittedly easy} version of Bargue drawing exercises.
You can learn so much from exercises like this, where you can study how another artist has handled composition and built up the paint. It can also help you to see problems that may have faced the artist along the way, and how they overcame them. Two of my Julian Merrow-Smith iPad copies are as follows: Bottle of Balsamic and Two Plums. I encourage anyone reading this post to view more of Julian’s work on his website, and also to buy his inspirational book.
