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 an endless drive to pick up artist materials, ranging from a ballpoint pen on scrap paper to more archival paints and papers, and see what happens.  

I have many 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.

I admit that I stopped painting watercolor on paper when I was seized with passion for digital art and the ability it gave me to continually transform artwork into multiple shapes, colors, and arrangements that can be used for products made on a home inkjet printer or submitted to print-to-order apps online.  The technology gave me the opportunity to correct many a badly drawn line done with poor quality materials, and turn snippets with potential for pattern into patterns I can instantly present to my online portfolio even if I haven't done anything yet to turn it into a physical product.  

Yet, I remain connected to the thousands of original drawings I have and 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.

File management is an enormous issue for doing work this way and being able to keep track of such a large quantity of work and make sure it is all backed up. 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 and unique point in what we experience as reality.  For awhile I left everything 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, 2020-2001-03-16-a4-JB is a component of Confetti Birds, which is displayed in the Yearbook Collection, 2001 page.

2001-03-16-a1, a2, a3, a4, a5 and a6