Guest Blogger Stefan Marjoram contributed this wonderful piece about his exploits with Adobe Ideas.
For more on Stefan, see http://stefanssketchblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/jaguar-tatra-and-alvis.html
20 years ago at art college I discovered that I could combine my love for both drawing and film by doing traditional 2D animation with pencil and paper. This was fine for a while but once I was doing it for a living, with tight deadlines, I realised I was going to have to find a way to speed things up a bit and I started to use a computer to help with the colouring. I teamed up with a colleague who had a Wacom tablet and I remember being totally amazed by it the first time I saw it.
Now I’ve spent half my professional life doing computer animation and I use Photoshop every day. Of course I still draw on paper too – most character designs will start as thumbnails in my sketchbook – but the ability to colour and tweak the designs once they’re in the computer is just brilliant. So brilliant, that I’d like to be able to take Photoshop out with me everywhere – if only there were some light weight tablet computer to run it on…
In November last year I tried a friend’s iPad and realised that although it wasn’t pressure sensitive I could begin to make drawings that I quite liked. I bought one the following week and so began a frenzied period of trying out every drawing app I could lay my hands on. The first thing I looked for was Photoshop. I didn’t find it but I did see that Adobe had something called ‘Ideas’ – and better still, it was free! To test it I tried a quick sketch of Cathy as she sat next to me watching TV…
The interface was simple to get to grips with and unobtrusive. It was very responsive and I liked the smoothing that was applied to the strokes – it made them look a bit more confident and polished. I liked the interesting approach to the palettes too – Ideas allows you to create custom colour groups using imported photos and other images. I’ve never been that confident with colour work and I’ve found that spending a few moments picking a set f colours that work well together before you start drawing has been very helpful. Here’s a couple of drawings and the photo their palette came from…
Over the past few months I’ve tried drawing many different subjects. Here are some life drawings. I found the iPad and Adobe Ideas great for the quick warm up sketches we start the session with…
…I took my digital sketchbook with me on holiday too…
…and if you’ve visited my blog you’ll have seen lots and lots of cars…
What I really like about the results is the clean, “graphic” look. It’s completely different to my traditional work which is usually sketchy pencil with perhaps a watercolour wash. When I use Ideas I’m not trying to emulate my previous styles. It’s a different tool which makes its own sort of marks and the end results are therefore different too. It’s revealed to me a style of drawing that I didn’t know I could do – which I’m very chuffed about. (chuffed = very pleased)
Although I still feel I’m very much at the learning stage when it comes to iPad art I have managed to do the odd drawing which somebody has liked enough to want to buy a print of. By a stroke of luck I discovered that by using Ideas I had chosen an app that would be ideal for making prints from. Because it’s vector-based, unlike most other sketching software, the images can be exported as PDFs which can be scaled to enormous sizes without loss of quality. This is such a bonus for me as I’m often guilty of creating tiny images which are only really suitable for web use or perhaps stamps.
To prepare my image for printing I first e-mailed my image from Ideas – this attaches the image to an e-mail as a PDF file. I did this three times, hiding and showing different layers – so that I would have more control over them in Photoshop. When importing to Photoshop you can choose what resolution you’d like and I opted for 300dpi – this should be adequate for the A2 print, though I could have gone much higher and made a billboard poster.
Once in Photoshop I could reconstruct my layers and alter the colour, contrast and sharpness in preparation for the printing process.
And here’s the finished print. The limited palette and the graphic feel I mentioned earlier, means that it has a sort of screen-printed look and I’m delighted with that – that’s another thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do.
I’ve filled my iPad with dozens of sketching applications but I keep coming back to Adobe Ideas. Its speed, simplicity and the ability to export huge images means that it’s ideal for producing not just personal doodles but also finished print-ready work.
