Pencil cup

 

I found some bits of timber in our firewood that I thought, due to the colour, might be something a bit more interesting than pine, so I put one of them on the lathe and made it round. It was not more interesting than pine, in fact it's just pine. All the colour was on the outside.

When you're TTRPGing, one thing you need ready access to is a plenitude of pencils. So I finished the boring bit of pine into a pencil cup and stained and waxed it. It's a quicky job, and the finishing is pretty crappy, but it will serve for this job.

Being a thin-walled end-grain turning, it naturally split, so it'd be no good for holding liquid. And besides, all that stain and stuff would taste pretty awful.

iPad drawing -- now a go

 

Last year, when I was up visiting her, my lovely mother bought me a second-hand iPad Pro with a 13" screen. It's an old model, but still very good at what it does, within the limits of Apple's obsessive desire to not give their users any choices at all if they can possibly avoid it.

I thought it would be an excellent mobile digital art platform, and so it has proven to be... eventually. I installed Procreate, a very nice iPad art app, and set about learning how to use it. However, being an old model iPad, none of the newer affordable third-party iPad styluses would work with it. And in fact I wasted about a hunnerd-twenny bucks on what turned out to be a useless Logitech Crayon finding that out. In the end I just bought a cheap passive stylus, basically little more than a pointier artificial finger, and it served for very basic work.

At long last I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, and spent the money to get myself a 1st-generation Apple Pencil, and now all my digital drawing dreams are fulfilled.

The two coloured critters in this picture I drew, in Procreate, with my passive stylus. The two on the left in black & white I sketched using the Apple Pencil. The difference in drawing ease and fluidity is like night and day. The Apple Pencil is both tilt and pressure sensitive, and combined with Procreate's textural drawing algorithms, it's very much like drawing with pencil and paper.

There is a lot more of Procreate that I have to learn, but even with the little that I do know, all of a sudden this iPad has become a useful art-making device. I suspect I'll get a lot of use out of it.

Next day...

I've started playing (not very well) with layers and colour and some more of the brush types.

It's not a great picture, but it's been fun to mess around with.

Next Next Day....

Tinkering with a kind of scraperboard effect.