Imagine the stress: dozens of hours of easily smudged artwork rolled up, packed into a poster tube and shipped halfway around the world. You don’t know if it’s safe until it’s too late. That used to be the life of children's book illustrator Mark Jones. Then he bought an iPad Pro.
Jones, who has illustrated dozens of children's titles over the past decade on topics ranging from woodland critters and volcanos, to butterflies and the Bible, has seen his stress levels decrease and his productivity increase since putting down his chalk pastels and picking up an Apple Pencil in November 2015.
“I was recommended Procreate, and the first time my Apple Pencil touched the screen, it was like an epiphany,” he tells us. “It’s now become my main workhorse. I’ve done five books on the iPad Pro so far.”
“I thought I was going to get the iPad Pro, and it was going to be a sketching tool. I thought that I would have to take everything I did on iPad, and then to make it a fully finished, publish-worthy illustration, I’d have to transport it to the computer because that’s where the serious stuff happens. But then I got one, and I was like ‘Oh my god’.”
It took a while for Jones to get to this point. For 14 years he worked exclusively with traditional materials prone to smudging and less than perfect colour representation when scanned. Even as he transitioned there were a few digital storms before the calm.
“I had long been told that I needed to move into the digital sphere, but it almost felt like there was a barrier to it,” Jones, of Advocate Art says. “One of my steps on the way was me drawing in Photoshop using the finger pad on my laptop. It wasn’t terrible but it was laborious.”
Since making the jump to the iPad app Procreate, however, Jones hasn’t looked back, and has been able to take a new level of control over his work.
“I used to be sat at my desk pressing my face up against the paper trying to hide in little details. Now I can do that just by pinching the screen. That gives you a lot more freedom. I can create the image I see in my head.”
“I also don’t have to worry about messing up the background,” he tells us. “When I drew the whole illustration in one go, I would have to think ‘OK, I’m going to draw the characters, I’m going to need to leave space for them’. It was more complicated and I had to think much further ahead.”
“Now when I start drawing something, get detailed and then realise for composition reasons it’s in entirely the wrong part of the page I can just go in, select it, manipulate it and place it in the right place. That would be a start over on more traditional pieces of artwork. The book I just published was 70 pages. I did that in the same time, over three months, that I would do one of my early 20 page books in pastels.”
There is a downside to this improved efficiency though. Jones has lost his get out of jail free card. “Before, when someone wanted to do something, I could just say ‘sorry, I’m scanning things’. That was a big excuse for me,” he tells us.
Still, finding a new excuse to avoid an unwanted evening out seems like a small price to pay for a much quicker, easier, less stressful working environment. Right?
Procreate is available to download on iPad.