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. 

Here is a pic of two of the fine folks who keep me in coffee (and the occasional cookie!) when I'm working in my favorite cafe!
It rained - and not a small rain either! Torrents, in an unbroken cover of clouds, which is very unusual here in the desert. Most of our rain comes from isolated groups of clouds. Its quite wonderful when we see an unbroken cloud cover from horizon to horizon.

This desert has so many moods. Rain only enhances them. I remember some of the rainy stretches back east. Boston would be gray and rainy for days, sometimes even weeks at a time. That kind of constant rain could really take the steam out of your day.

Here, when it rains, it usually comes as a welcome break from the beautiful weather. In monsoon, you can watch the storms build in the course of the day. Often there are cloudless mornings. Ten O'Clock rolls around and there are a few puffy clouds, perhaps some high cirrus. By noon, the clouds have grown into castles - huge thunderheads loom on the horizon. Late afternoon they begin to march, down the mountains and into the city. And by early evening, normally the storms have done their damage and there is only a residue of rain or clouds. Some evenings produce lightning displays long after the rain has stopped. Sitting in the livingroom with the curtains open I can watch the flashes, so much brighter than the electric lightbulbs.

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.

New Endeavors

New endeavors are always good at the beginning of the new year. I've let this one go a bit late, as January is very nearly over but sometimes the intention has to account for something.