Like most kids, I used to love sketching. And like most kids, I gave it up the moment I realized that I wasn’t very good at it. This whole business of wanting to do only things one is good at is one of the first adult corruptions of a child’s mind. But I recently bought an iPad and after several hours of AppStore surfing, decided to buy this $4.99 app called SketchBook Pro from Autodesk and all of a sudden, the app made me feel like a kid again. I’m still not very good at it but all of the brushes and effects made it rather addictive to use. Using ones hands is so much better than mucking about with the mouse on Photoshop. One of the first things I drew was this:
It then struck me that I could do something I’ve always postponed because I was too lazy to do it in Photoshop. When I was in Vidya Mandir, I used to draw space battles featuring my classmates in the back pages of my school notebooks, and thanks to Sketchbook Pro, here’s Jalscifi, a new Tampunk series at the blunt edge of Scifi, Madras and Pop culture.
Still rough at the edges (and the middle as well) but hopefully my iPad sketching skills will get better with time. But sometimes I wonder if it’s really about skills anymore. I get this feeling that technology is getting better at polishing mediocrity more than anything else.
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