Joanne Brown - Translations: Introduction

Stairway Runner, Digital Art, Pattern 2, 2024

Pen and Paper to Digital Art Translations

I can't tell you how artwork happens to me. I don't have an image in my head that I'm trying to recreate on paper. It's mostly stream of consciousness.

I have sketchbooks full of doodles that I took ideas from to create my watercolor paintings in the 1980s and 1990s. I got the sketchbooks back out of the closet when I got my first personal computer and scanner in 1999 and bought art software Paint Shop Pro. It took me years to scan everything in and I went through countless technical transformations as software changed, digital tools improved, old digital file formats were discontinued, and in some cases I've had to recreate the digital drawing at least three times in order to adapt it to the latest best file format and software. Things are more stable now with digital art software and I've settled in to Adobe Illustrator for iPad, with the Apple Pencil, Adobe Illustrator for iMac, an iPhone camera, and a Canon printer/scanner as my main tools.

My current interest is to translate these doodles into vector drawings, store them in the Adobe Creative Cloud library, and ultimately use them at will to create new artwork and patterns. This page is an exhibit of the initial translations of doodles drawn with pen and ink into a vector drawing. These are waiting in the wings for adoption to new pieces of more complicated artwork.

The analog names of my artwork have always been the date that I made the artwork. Dates, times, longitude and latitude combinations are very significant to me as they are a fixed, permanent and unique point in what we experience as reality. We can connect to those points with methods such as memory, travel, story-telling, scientific measurement instruments, and photographs. For many years I left all of my artwork untitled in every other way, leaving the subject to the imagination of the viewer.

That became unwieldy as I accumulated so much artwork, and I added a name layer over top of the date name. The doodles on this page only have the date name, organized so that a computer will layer them in order by date, e.g. 2001-03-16; the page numbers for that would be, e.g. 2001-03-16-a, b, c and so on, and the doodle has a number for its place on the page, e.g. 2001-03-16-a1. The digital version of the drawing will have the year it was created on the front, e.g. 2020-2001-03-16-a1-JB, my initials added as signature.

If one of these drawings progresses to artwork with a creative name being added over top the date name, you'll find it on another page. For example, 2001-04-17-a7-JB is a component of Spinning Eye Flower, which is displayed in the Yearbook Collection, 2001 page.

2001-04-17-a - Pen and Ink on Paper, Little Dummy Sketchbook, 2001

2001-04-17-a - Vector Drawings, 2020

Left: 2001-04-17-a, Pen and Ink on Paper, Little Dummy Sketchbook, 2001

Right: 2020-2001-04-17-a1, a2, a3, a4, a5, a6, a7, a8, a9 - Vector Drawings, 2020

Above is an example of a Little Dummy sketchbook page I scanned, placed into Illustrator for iPad, traced with the Apple Pencil to create vector drawings, and then transformed the vector drawings into other artwork, examples below.