Maackia 021: Drawing with a digital pencil

I’m Nathan Langley and this is Maackia, a monthly newsletter on my favourite drawing app for the iPad!

I will never forget my first design studio class. Light-headed — heart racing. Panic approaching visible terror. I have to do what?

Using AutoCAD for the first time was an experience, never mind continually fighting with it for two straight years. There were other programs that we could have been working with, but AutoCAD was the “industry standard.” It was, essentially, mandatory even if no one would say so.

We didn’t receive formal instruction on how to use it. At least, nothing similar to what you would learn from a technical college or an online course. Instead, we were given some basic command prompts and set to work on our first project.

Yes, you read that correctly: prompts. Think MS-DOS, yet somehow even more frustrating (I’m supposed to draw by typing meaningless letters together — what year is this?). Working with external base files, trying to scale drawings, and printing were all recurring nightmares you couldn’t shake once they were over. God help you if you were given a file that was made using imperial measurements instead of metric and didn’t notice until you went to print.

The day before a project was due was always manic. An entire class (and often an entire building at the end of a semester) of malnourished, gaunt, sleep-deprived lunatics twitching their way to future (assumed) success.

Looking back, I can (sort of) see the goal from the school’s perspective. Our class was a jumble of people with different backgrounds: some were artists, some worked with plants. One unfortunate soul had experience with AutoCAD. I guess our instructors thought we would bond in the studio and figure everything out together to produce the deliverables they wanted.

They turned out to be right. But what a way to learn.

One of the marketable benefits to the Guelph landscape architecture program was their insistence on hand drawing in the studio, despite being perceived as old-fashioned. Again, there was no formal training in how to draw. Just a brief introduction to the basics and we were set on our way. But I found this part of the program much more useful than my interactions with AutoCAD.

One of the most frustrating things I find about working in a creative space is not getting your ideas down before they are gone. The self loathing coming from the pit of your stomach after realizing you forgot a “great” idea is potent. Particularly if you have been struggling with a project. Pure revulsion.

Working with a pen and paper cuts out all the stumbling and distractions that come with using a computer. It’s just you, a piece of paper, and your thoughts.

bing!

Is that a message? No? Ah well. What was I doing…

Drawing with markers and pens is a joy. Truly! You can see your thoughts develop over time. You can work in a generative, open mode without judgement. It is simple and purposeful. But it can get a little messy keeping track of everything.

I graduated from school in the spring of 2015. The first iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil was released in September of the same year.

I didn’t start designing gardens with my iPad until 2019. My time at school would have been vastly different if the iPad Pro was released a few years earlier. I attribute its usefulness to one specific program: Concepts. It was this app, along with the Apple Pencil, that changed how I worked. Almost everything I produce today is done on an iPad.

It all comes back to simplicity. Concepts gets out of my way so that I can get my ideas down quickly without any yak shaving or external distractions. And when I am ready to develop those ideas, everything is in one place inside an app that can scale up or down to meet my needs.

I don’t have to worry about colour palettes, or external files. Scaling a drawing in imperial or metric is a breeze. The page is infinitely adaptable to what I am doing (it’s vector and not raster). It has different brushes, pens, pencils, and all the Copic marker colours. And, most importantly, it is fast!

Working on an iPad is the closest digital implementation of drawing with a pen and paper that I have found. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a bit of time to get used to how Concepts works, and you are still writing on a piece of glass. But I couldn’t image going back to the industry “standard” or working solely on paper. My mind and body would revolt.