iPad Sketching on Location

It’s been a long time since my last post. My life has taken some unexpected turns, but my love for sketching remains intact. From now on I intend to post much more regularly, upload more videos to my YouTube channel and much more. I am now living in north Texas, so I’ll be sketching a lot on location as I get to know my new surroundings.

Lately I have been using my iPad a lot for work so I’ve been getting much more comfortable with it, to the point I have been using it a lot for sketching on location. Digital sketching has its challenges, but I’ve gotten to appreciate its numerous advantages.

I can take it anywhere, even to museums where ink or watercolors are not allowed. I can have all the colors that I want. Digital graphite does not smudge and does not need sharpening. I have unlimited pencils, pens, markers, brushes at the top of my finger. And I don’t have to scan afterwards to share online.

For sketching on location I use an app called Tayasui Sketches Pro. Very simple but pretty impressive. The pens, pencils and the watercolor brushes work really good. I have really enjoyed using the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil with this app for sketching on the go. Here are some of my sketches with it.

My new places

My family and I have recently moved from Puerto Rico to Wilmington, Delaware.  We’re looking for better alternatives of treatment and rehabilitation for our son.  A change was probably very needed in so many ways though.

This means I have not only one, but two cities to sketch!  If everything goes well, I’m about to start working in Center Philadelphia next week, and Philly has so many interesting things to sketch.  Besides, in the first few days I met Joshua, a local caricaturist with whom I expect to practice the craft a lot.  I’m attending with my wife a figure drawing class on Wednesdays at DCAD, getting dirty with charcoal… And of course, also I’m still participating on the weekly caricature challenge on Facebook, Caricatura Puertorriquena en FB.

I haven’t sketched that much outside, as it’s been raining most of the days, but here are some of my latest:

Caricatures of Celebrities

The world of caricature drawing has grabbed me in such a way I never thought possible. I have been learning a lot and can’t have enough of it. This morning I watched a video of the phenomenal artist and illustrator Joe Bluhm. He was sketching a caricature of Kanye West, and explaining his thought process while doing it.

He was sketching it directly in Photoshop, I’m guessing with a Wacom. Although I do own a license of Photoshop, I don’t have a Wacom, so on the iPad it is. He explained that he likes to constantly switch between defining shapes with lines and with shades. This seemed interesting, and judging by his results, I definitely needed to try it.

Another interesting thing he said was that sketching celebrities is a good way to develop your portfolio and show how you’re able to achieve likeness more than by posting caricatures of people no one knows. Well, so I decided to do it myself, and if I’m sketching a celebrity, I have to start with my all-time favorite musician, Sting.

I’ll be posting my progress with this caricature; this time I started directly on the iPad, using the app Procreate and a stylus. Here is how the first stage is at this moment:

Caricatures on the iPad

For the past few weeks I’ve been learning some things I had wanted to do for a very long time. I’ve been taking video lessons on how to sketch portraits, human figure, different techniques and different media. I’m been really curious about pastel pencils. I remembered I had one of these pencils but am having trouble sharpening it…

Also I’ve been practicing caricatures on the iPad. I’ve tried different apps, like Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage, but my favorite has been Procreate. It’s very stable and once that I mistakenly quit the app, it opened it back exactly where I was. I know I’m still scratching the surface, but the results have been very promising.

ArtRage was a bust, cool effects but quickly crashed with no autosave. Also it is more sluggish than Procreate and Sketchbook Pro. The winning point for me is that in Procreate I can use 16 layers at full resolution, instead of a smaller canvas as in SB Pro. I also find the interface much more easy to use.

Here are some of the caricatures I did, sketching with pencil first, photographing the sketches and rendering with Procreate: