Drawing with Autodesk Sketchpad for iPod

Over the past few weeks I’ve set for myself the task of making a minimum of three paintings a day on my iPod.  Sometimes in the evening, I’ll make as many as 15 – though usually I prefer to keep it down to a handful, before moving into Photoshop on my laptop to do more involved work.
The iPod images have been more of a creative generator than anything else.  I remembered a series of paintings I did several decades ago inspired by the stone figure known as “Venus of Willendorf”.  For the iPod images, I’ve been using Venus. and a Priapic figure (man with erect member) as the guidelines for the images.  Beyond that, they are colorful and playful, not great art perhaps, but interesting
I’ve been working for a long time with automatic images and writing – that is, not having any fixed ideas when I begin an image or a poem – as a way of tapping in to my subconscious, and learning to play with my mind a bit.  The Autodesk Sketchpad app on my iPod is uniquely suited towards automata.
First, it is very easy to use, and furnishes a myriad of excellent brushes, flexible color palettes, and a direct drawing surface.  I bought a cheap combination touch stylus and ball point pen – and with it, drawing on the iPod Touch is just like drawing or painting on paper. 
Today I’m celebrating my 200th iPod/Sketchpad painting since the beginning of 2012.  Hopefully sometime this year I’ll be able to by a larger tablet (both iPads and Kindle Fires have versions of SketchPad – ) so that I can work on slightly more involved images.  For now, I’m enjoying doing the work on my tiny touchscreen, and making images that are the size of postcards.
Its an interesting corollary to the work I’m doing on my MAWMAP project.  There is a lot of flexibility in the digital imaging that I don’t have when I paint with gouache or watercolor. 
Its also been a great boost to my productivity in the manuscript though, because working with digital tools has allowed me to really expand and improve my drawing and painting skills.  I can try things out on my laptop, desktop, or iPod, and then work up the initial studies into fully painted or inked versions in the manuscript. 
Conversely, I’ve been enjoying the face that I can use digital scanning and character recognition to transfer my hand-written entries in the manuscript into Word or Pages documents with moveable type, so that after the initial automatic writing is finished, I can digitize and begin to edit the raw material into finished poems, stories, essays, or meditations, and then rewrite the finished work into the manuscript.  I’m thinking that the next volume will be a lot of images that were worked up in the digital format transferred into hand techniques. 

A Little Rant about writing that digresses to other things

Wacom tablets are terrific. I'm sitting at a desk with my laptop, writing this by hand with my Wacom  tablet. The software reads my awful handwriting (imagine your doctor's sig. on a very had day!). The software reads it and posts it in moveable type! Better still, If I write a message out as a Photoshop file, I can take the image into a translations program and have a "hand" written image as well as the moveable type version.The best of both worlds! Another item  I'm toying with as an element of my book project is using my iPod touch with a voice translation program (Dragon Dictation) so that I can record thoughts on the go, and have the translator output it as type.  I wonder what James Joyce might have accomplished had he had access to this stuff... He could have actually walked the strand beach and dictated as he went. This will definitely add a new dimension to stream of consciousness writing! Lately work on the physical book has been largely images. Long days painting and little energy for writing with pen and ink. Now with the new software I  can write or dictate my thoughts and use them later as basis for writing in the physical book. A friend suggested printing out the pages on my ink jet and pasting them into the book, but I think instead I may just use in Design or Photoshop to design a print version of the type and then either import scans of drawings and paintings, or add native photoshop images to spice things up. I want to create a bridge between the physical book and the digital one. I also need to think about ways that the digital becomes PURELY digital. I.E., moving images, live recorded segments, animations. A digital book should definitely do things the a physical book cannot. So: Dreamweaver, InDesign, Photoshop, Final Cut should all be a part of it. How Do I: get the two sides to interact in ways that make sense? It should be easy to make a digital copy of the physical volume, but what elements of the digital work world be appropriate to include in the other? I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to do something traditional in a contemporary fashion. So much has evolved over the past few years. The other day it occurred to me that if I attach my computer to my television, I can create imagery in photo shop that is native to a large screen television. I can use my kindle reader to read books on my television. So: my television becomes a book. My laptop becomes a book. My iPod becomes a book. Conversely, my book can become a webpage; my book can become a movie. My book can become an email or a text message, or a sound file (if read aloud) accompanied by a typeset version of the type file. Reading this now. I think that Science Fiction as understood it as a child is no longer FICT ION is no longer fiction. All the things that Dick and Heinlein and Ellison predicted are at our disposal now. Its an amazing time to be an artist, And we haven't even started to make a dent in what we can accomplish. There are new art forms waiting to be born, forms nobody has even dreamed of yet, forms that have entirely in the digital realm, things that are both concrete and ephemeral, art that exists in a new dimension of words and colors and movement and time. In the new art world, we can find ways of communicating ideas and stimulating thought that are immediately more powerful, useful, and accessible than anything we have had in the past. Here is something that I know for a fact. Call it my prophecy or my science fiction if you wish. That in the very near future somebody will create a form of information vehicle which beans no resemblance to a book a but it will be so efficient and easy to interact with that it will move through the human community the a virus.tall. It will function wholly in the digital realm. It will have no pages-and it won't be a scroll. It will take advantage of the sheer depth of memory and retrieval and imaging that a computer has to offer. or, perhaps, will use a new technology that we will not even recognize as a computer Something else that hasn't been thought of or invented yet. Hopefully will get there sooner rather than later. And I also suspect (though I won't say predict) that the mystical transformation that we hear about from the esoteric community will use this new form as its delivery system. For a change of cons Lives ness to occur instantaneously, in "the twinkling of an eye", all that would be necessary is for every human mind to see/ feel/ experience this one idea, P.o.V., image, thought, whatever at the same moment. I think that we are on our way to that, within reach of that, its nearly here. We should make our minds up as a species that we are going to get there. Set a date even, say December 21, 2012. That seems convenient Not the day of the great apocalypse that some are predicting: rather, the great revelation. Forgive my little rant.  If you’ve read it, you should know that all these writings are spurious, extemporaneous, off the cuff, written as I think them, without censoring.   If I am completely wrong on this, I will say that it was just a thought I had, there and gone, no deeply held belief
(beyond, perhaps, a wish that it be true!) If I’m right, I’ll say that I knew it from the start and pretend to be smart. 

Note by the Man I Might Have Been

I've been working on a book for about a year now. More correctly, I have been working on a volume in a collection of books. I always have a volume or two in progress, but this one has had a peculiar focus for me. The volume itself is a luxurious, oversized and leather bound book, with hand marbled paper on the cover, and handmade Amalfi paper, slightly off white with a beautiful laid surface that holds both watercolor and ink nicely. The ink never crawls, and there is no bleed through, even when I work the sheets heavily. The pages are entirely hand written, and hand illustrated. Although early volumes of this project were fairly standard journals - accounts of my day to day life. This latest one is a little different. I remember reading an essay by Camus where he discussed the process of writing. "Everything as it comes!" he said. I started writing with that impulse, writing every thought I could capture, no matter how stupid or insignificant it seemed at the time. This new book has some of that. I have several titles for it. One is "Mind at Work, Mind at Play" and that describes the shifts between free writing and more structured things. One of the other titles is "Notes By the Man I Might Have Been" which are elements written like entries in a normal journal, but as if written by myself on a different time line. They are fanciful, and definitely fiction, a fun way to see what alternative choices in my life might have gained or lost me. Would I have been happier had I married that woman? Would I have been better off had I accepted a record deal with Taang? What if I had become a witch, or followed a different path altogether? What if I'd never gone to Germany? Some of these questions are addressed in a journal written by a very different me. Is it profound in any way? I doubt it. Are there valuable thoughts in it? Some. Does it attempt to teach or even reach deep truths? No. Is if fun to work on? Absolutely! And I find it fun to leaf through. This is not a book to be read and explicated, so much as it is an attempt, simply, to share thoughts. Thoughts are nebulous, confusing, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Sometimes they engender trust, sometimes they are full of lies, sometimes they are patterned but just as often they are chaotic. Some of the stories are funny. Some are tragic, or very very sad. Some are even truthful, insofar as distant memory can be truthful.
I've been telling people lately that the book is a playground at its essence. I go there to play games with myself. My hope is that some people in leafing through my book will find it entertaining. What do I want the book to do? Well I certainly hope that it will entertain. Some people may like the paintings. Some may find the writing interesting. Hopefully, some will find the exercise interesting enough that they will create their own! I'd love to see thousands of these kinds of books made in the next century, some on paper, some digital, some in formats and media that hasn't been dreamed up yet. But at base, people sharing thoughts. My particular format has been the book - old style is what the kids say about me. I like the look and the feel of a book, particularly ones like this one that are well made. I love to leaf through volumes, looking at thoughts that others have left there for me. I also love how much a book can change with its setting. It appears one way in daylight, a different way in flourescent light, different still by candlelight. Surround it with gold and ornaments and it can set a spiritual tone. Put it plain on the grass in a meadow and it becomes something altogether different. Thoughts are absorbed as they are read, like somebody eating a light snack. Pop it in, swallow it down, digest what is of worth, shit out the rest.