We had a great night tonight. Clare suggested last week that we try something new and draw via an ipad. Now since i do not own an Ipad, I had only one option, my Dell Precision Laptop and Wacom. It was tricky, my laptop is the weight of several bricks, and setting up the computer along side the Wacom on my stand, was challenging. Getting a feel for this took time, I was late for class so I had no warm up… I was coming in cold, damn cold. My screen was fixed, so I couldn’t move it portrait position, although we did try that (thanks Bill!)  When I did turn the laptop around for better drawing ‘real estate’, it makes things more mind bending when using the Wacom in unison with the screen, (what goes up, really goes left)

Clare did great work tonight however and gave us some great poses to draw from, one or two of them were nice and difficult, just the way I like it! All of these poses were 20min each. I spent a good bit of time correcting for proportion etc when drawing on the laptop at first. Takes some getting used to. It was fun playing with different brush settings in realtime, as opposed to changing from charcoal, to ink in the real world. I was able to put my drawings through post and get a nice inked look though. They turned out quite well. If i were to do this again, I might think about a bigger screen somehow. The one thing I wasn’t happy about most, was not being able to vary the weight of my lines the way i wanted. I was working in a very small window and when zoomed in, it was too easy to lose track of everything else. I’m big and heavy on gesture and I like to work big… this was a real challenge!  (Geez, thanks Clare – great idea you had last week!!)