i have rushed my body to the nearest cafe to draw with my I PAD and apple pencil. I picked up this body from the bedroom and instructed it to pick up a digital interface and reach a nearest cafe, order coffee and sit and draw the bouquet of faces sent by a participant as part of the Artist book project.

But it’s a struggle and a joy. And little nuances of drawing come on the way. I am the only physical entity here. So is the Apple pencil and afterwards, it is digital participation. So what do we have ?

my body and the mind, the consciousness.	physical, mental, metaphysical
the hand	an extension of the mind, something i don’t consciously see when i draw, just like the screen of the I PAD.
the table where i sit and draw	objects supporting me to sit and work. they are limited to a certain time frame. ie: in 2021, this is how we work. We need an enviornement
The I PAD	it is not a sketchbook. it is part physical as a body, and part a digital, virtual space entirely run through an intelligence with its own set of rules, laws of functioning.
The Apple pencil	is not a pencil. it is has no graphite to be called as a pencil. nor is it a pen. It is tool which responds to artificial mediums and can become anything. It can replicate a pen, pencil, brush, rubber. It is a lie to call it a pencil.

So what did i do in Procreate?

I started to draw a face. And what i noticed was, that I was drawing from a mobile to the I PAD. so unreal, because this face is an image and i am now drawing lines on an interface to make a face. And when i was making this face, I got interested in getting an expression of the face in lines. For a very long time, i could not find how to reduce the opacity of the layer on which i was drawing and all this while discovering more and more features of this App. That the more you search, the more you come to know that it is not just about DRAWING A LINE but tools such as drawing assist, or invert the drawing etc. Like they are running undercurrent waiting for you to tip on them, to do something.

i choose to avoid them, to stick to a pen like line to exercise drawing.

This is all it is. As i zoom in with two fingers of mine and i could make it into a DOT if i zoomed out. So a qutab minar could become a match stick and a match stick could become a qutab minar through zooming in and out.

Lines in the pen line can be erased out. And lines can be drawn, then faded in the layer to draw another layer. And when you work in layers, you start to imagine there are layers.

What did i do.	I made lines with a pen like object on a screen and felt like it was creating these lines. The earlier pen bought by me in 2013 lacked the precision of a line drawn by a pen. This apple pencil did not.
how did it feel	it felt good when i printed it out, to be part of an artist book. It gave me a feeling that I drew it. I know i am false, Anything which i say i did is also unclear as a claim. I did not do anything. I bought this tool to draw. So that it creates a stimulation for me. It gives me representational quality of drawing a face. It satisfies me. This product is in itself a manipulation. It is a desired machinery. It saves me paper. So that felt good. I can draw, erase, turn as many pages in this sketchbook, increase, decrease the size of the paper. If i can call it paper. It becomes paper once printed on a STATIONARY A 4 size paper because i dont have a paper which 20 feet by 20 feet and a printer the size of a ship. Everything is in proportion to my body.
the face	i didnt want to draw a face, but find something when i make that face. Something of that human being, something which opens up who the other is which is not possible when you see an image. To go over contours which make up the human. It is this meta experience which interests me. The interface could be anything i feel. As long as this is achived in repition, then it works. So the I PAD and especially the pencil succseed so far. They allow a smooth transition. Like walking, or taking a train to get to a river, lake, water body to take a ferry. The ferry should keep me relavitly comfortable, so that i can have my tea, coffee, and not be thrown around like an egg in a mixie being spun and made into minced meat. Its the transition, that we human beings love. That to board a plane, we get mentally disturbed if there is turbulance. It should be close to sitting experience as we do on land. Same with drawing on paper to drawing on a screen. We are a weird species.
Where I left off	when i work, whenever i work, i usually reach a climax point and i let go of the work. I finally figured out how to reduce the opacity after watching you tube videos, reading online forums. Once i saw the opacity reduce into a grey zone, i felt good. i felt this as a powerful tool. How can i reduce the opacity of my drawing in a sketchbook. I can not. The line is what it is. So i left the cafe exhausted/
what did i do	from the bag of goodies of faces and the body, i chose to work on two. Its important to see what gets interested. what gets me pulled to draw. One was because of the light effect on the head and the body. It was a side pose but it gave a nice spatial moment to enjoy what i was seeing. It was a side pose with a ornament around the neck. The clothes were flowing. The hair was tightly in a bun. The person was thinking of something. So i could draw. I started from hair. The second after this is a full body pose. We see the person intrigued seeing the phone. After a while i realise i can see one eye seeing the phone. The hand was in front of the body. Something of depth perception which i taught yesterday and i was reading also, how one box is in front of another box. Depending on where we are standing, we see. And the hand was intriguing. I had an appearing, disappearing act. It made its presence felt. so did the Egg like shape of the head. For this i drew out in strokes the whole structure. The stroke like act was fun. It took away the tension of seeing and drawing slowly. I could just pat the pen tuk tuk tuk to get these free flowing lines and i started to see the body appear on the screen. Afterwards i got frustrated as i could not reduce opacity of the layer. Then the next 20 minutes was spent on HOW TO !!!!

Concluding thought

faces convey a thought. They convey a sense of mood the other might be inhabiting. a sense of aesthetics as to how they are made up of. Who they are, or who they are, as i perceive them in this moment, or to change a moment of time in my mind. Only if temporary, i let the face change me from within. I don’t capture just a face, but develop a power to see.