At the end of last year, I picked up Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S6 to replace my ailing Sony XPERIA Z4 Tablet. The Z4 had been perfect for me though poor sales meant Sony never released a successor, and the Tab S6 is the first tablet since to tick all my boxes. Samsung bundles the S-Pen stylus, which I expected to be an unnecessary addition for me, like the keyboard included with the Z4 which languished untouched in a drawer for years. Around the new year, I started playing around with a few sketching apps on the tablet. Little did I know that this would develop into a hobby perfectly suited to forthcoming social distancing, the timing being fortuitous for my sanity. The initial experiments were incredibly rough, but I found it therapeutic to have a new creative outlet at a point when I have been struggling for writing inspiration (hence the lack of new Shards). I settled on a technique of inking over photographs to highlight the details I wanted to capture, then using multiple layers for colouring and finally adding shadows and highlights for depth. After trying a few apps I settled on Adobe Illustrator Draw for its thicker strokes. And then it suddenly clicked. You will be able to find my illustrations as a new area of the Artist section of the site, divided into a few basic categories that will likely grow over time.

I began with portraits of individuals because using them for fleeting birthday wishes was an understated way to share what I produced as I improved. Shamini, who has been drawing D&D characters for some time, provided helpful mentoring as I found a style I liked, including the addition of stylised backgrounds from my own photography. That led to adapting a photograph from her birthday party (remember birthday parties?) into a fairytale witch. I discovered that slavish recreation of a photograph often resulted in an image that seemed less realistic because of unusual optics or angles in the underlying image. Influenced by my photography, my focus was originally on faces, with sparser detail on the rest of the image. You can see how that developed over time into the intricate detail in Tempest’s corset. It is incredibly time-consuming, but that’s arguably perfect for lockdown and I find the finely detailed work soothing. Meanwhile the drawing of Shep shortly after he died was my limited offering at a distance to his grieving family, as well as a tribute to a wonderfully good boy.

The first series of drawings I consciously produced as an ongoing set (after liking the result of the original image of Angie) is the “Isolation Series“. Created as the COVID-19 lockdown began in the UK, these were an attempt to capture the atmosphere of self-isolation. The loosely linked images feature pensive, lone individuals surrounded by a white void rather than a background. Each also contains certain objects in considerable detail as a focal point outside of the person themselves.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most popular images I have shared are those linked to pop culture. I had an evocative photo I had taken of Dave from an unusual angle with a fish-eye lens. The white shirt and red tie were immediately reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead and his expression seemed to fit too. Netflix’s Tiger King show proved a welcome distraction to those in quarantine, and drawing tiger print provided an intricate, time-consuming distraction of its own. Lastly, photographs of cosplayers like kysplay allow the creation of stylised images that lie somewhere between the individual and the source material which inspired their look. Just don’t tell Harry Potter fans that to emulate Breath of the Wild’s towering ruins I actually used a photograph I’d taken of Hogwarts!

I am glad that people seem to be enjoying these, and it’s allowing me to go through some of my historic photographs to produce new images at a time when I cannot simply take my camera out. It’s also offering a new perspective on some images, as well as making me increasingly aware of certain interactions of light that will feed back into photography. Do let me know what you think, and which are your favourites.