Strokes ... strokes and more strokes… on paper.

I’ve been a digital artist for many years. Most of my roughs, linearts and colored works stay behind the cold crystal of the monitor, I’ve used virtual palettes and blended color channels, I’ve used selections and history brushes, worked in RGB and CMYK, Grayscale and Bitmaps, I’ve used the static Wacom for many years and bought RAM memory, hard drives, motherboards and monitors, each time with higher quality. Thinking in kilobytes, megs, gigs and teras, in .psd, .cdr, .ill, .jpg, .tif and .gif formats, compressing in .rar, visualizing thumbnails, organizing folders, burning DVDs, backing up in partitions, formatting windows, using commands and shortcuts in the keyboard and I’ve clicked on the mouse thousands of millions of times.

But it has not always been like that…

There was a time in which I worried about paper quality, the ink’s blackness, that my pens didn’t bend, that my originals didn’t wrinkle, thinking in watercolors, pastels, acrylics and wooden colors, combining colors, graphite, blue lead, soft and kneaded erasers. I liked to feel the dried ink on the Opalina board originals, the texture of Strathmore paper, the smell of Fabriano paper, the tightness of Canson paper, the dust of pastel or the smell of wood when I bit my pencils, after moments of not knowing how to set up my sketchbook.

Then work came, earning money doing what I liked the most was cool, the need of a quick production led me to use digital media. I found out about the tablet, started studying about printing media, color formats, monitor calibration, I stored my brushes, put my pencils in plastic cans, and stored my watercolors and pastels in drawers. The cloth with which I cleaned Chinese ink and acrylic got dusty and my charcoal sticks stayed stored in their cases.

Many years have passed and I find myself in times of incredible artists, that have made the passion for graphite and 2mm blue lead to be reborn within me, that have inspired me to go back to material stores to buy my sketchbook, pencils for watercolor, art markers, artists that have reminded me of the sensation of Canson under the back of my hand when drawing

Suddenly clumsy in this reencounter with my old friends, and while my studio fills again with the smell of paint and alcohol of markers, it will be enjoyable to share the results of practices in this new experiment, may the warmth of the paper texture be mutual accomplice from here and on.

I leave the first two works from my sketchbook. The first is at the head of this entry, inspired by a great friend of mine, Abril, from Guadalajara. The second, over this paragraph, result of an unlikely evening with Bren, a suigeneris (unique) and very fun girl.