Trials and tribulations of tablet sketching, traveling in Turkey

[Guest Post by Leslie Akchurin] This June, my husband and I set off to visit some wonderful old and new places during our annual visit to our extended family in Turkey. And I looked forward to sketching all along the way, having discovered the pleasures and ease of working on the iPad a few years ago. As it turned out, I encountered a significant app problem for the first time, but I returned home still devoted to this exciting artistic medium.

Until recently, I used Paper 53 exclusively because it’s intuitive and simple to use and can create nice pencil and watercolor-like effects. But recently, looking for more variation in pencil line quality, I switched to Tayasui Sketches. This application is still easy to use. It shares some capabilities with more complex programs, especially the use of different layers (so a background wash, for instance, can be erased or reworked without disturbing other lines and color) and the ease in adjusting width and density for most of the tools. The “watercolor” washes and infinite color palette are just as nice as Paper’s, plus Sketches has a crayon-like tool that I loved right away.

Antalya Beach

I used that crayon tool, for instance, on the bathing suits in this picture from the public beach in the port section of Antalya. The beach was full of Russians, who have recently been moving to this part of the city in large numbers. Thanks to the unobtrusive nature of my art kit, I sat under an umbrella right behind the bathing families and drew without being detected, achieving the kind of invisibility that those of us who find it difficult to concentrate when we’re being watched really value. As long as I have shade, I find I can draw, though it’s true that I sometimes need to adjust colors later because it can be difficult to determine their accuracy while outside.

Konya mosque

After a week in seaside Antalya, my husband and I traveled with his brother northeast into Anatolia, first to Konya, the city where Mevlevi whirling dervishes originated in the 13th century. Thirty-five years ago, I found this town to be very dusty, sleepy, and traditional, with the townsfolk wearing old-fashioned baggy clothing, caps, and shawls. Today, while still quite conservative, Konya has become a city of over a million people, with only a few landmarks that I could recognize. We happened to be there just a few days before the national elections, which meant that vans plastered with garish photos of candidates passed us every few minutes, blaring slogans and deafening folk music. But in the hush of the beautiful Selcuk-era Alaeddin Mosque, we found a rapt all-female tour group listening to their guide. Again, it was only the very discrete nature of my materials that allowed me to stand mere feet away without attracting much attention. I drew very quickly—the figures first and then the basic outlines of some architecture—and just as a larger tour was entering, I took a quick photo with my iPad to remind myself of the locations of some decorative detailing, which I later represented with some transfer dotting, one of the pre-made graphic elements available on the Sketches app.

Flock on plains

From Konya, we traveled further northeast, through the ever-shifting light and shapes of Anatolian mountains and plains. Although sensitivity to motion usually keeps me from even reading in a moving car, I found I was able to make this quick sketch of a distant shepherd with his flock. Having all your tools permanently at your fingertips sometimes makes drawing possible when you least expect it.

Balloons in Goreme

Our destination was the town of Goreme in the famous cave region of Cappadocia, where early each morning dozens of balloons carry tourists above the astonishingly shaped hills. I tried to convey the pervasive dawn glow of this scene outside our cave hotel room window by selecting a peach background color for the base layer; most iPad art apps allow you an almost limitless choice of “paper” colors and some choice of texture. I enjoyed the thrill of the chase as the light rapidly changed and the balloons floated off.

Both the visuals and the complicated history of Cappadocia were so much more varied and interesting than we’d anticipated, and I eagerly set to sketching—the scenery, buildings, international tourists, camels—but to my great dismay, my app crashed on the second afternoon, something that had never happened to me before, and I lost three or four promising drawings. I had made color notes but hadn’t added all the color and so hadn’t saved the drawings to my desktop “Photos” file. If I’d been near computers and equipment, I might have found a way to save that work, but we were only mid-trip and of course I wanted to continue sketching. So I just gnashed my teeth a bit and resolved to save, much more frequently, all future drawings in progress so that after a possible crash they can be re-imported to a Sketches layer and thus finished. My app has only crashed once since then, and that advice to myself allowed me to save the picture I was working on. I’ve also learned to plan my moves better and to shift a bit slower between tools, which I think has probably prevented more incidents.

Anamur

After three days, we drove south, back over the Taurus mountain range, to the coast and enjoyed visiting Tarsus, where St. Paul was born and Cleopatra apparently used to meet Mark Antony. Then my brother-in-law expertly navigated us westward along the narrow, twisty mountain coastal roads to very windy Anamur, Turkey’s southernmost town and producer of most of its bananas. Its relative inaccessibility has prevented Anamur from growing into a big city in recent decades, unlike so many other Mediterranean towns that have acquired modern roads and airports. It largely retains the lazy backwater feel of a village, with a lovely if somewhat seedy beach mostly populated by locals.

Cirali Beach

After returning to Antalya for a week or so, my husband and I visited our favorite coastal town, which is about a 1½ -hour drive west into Lycia. Cirali is home to one of several cities and accompanying mountains in the ancient world that were named Olympus. But this one was the home of the fire-breathing monster, Chimera (eternally burning flames by that name can still be visited today), which Bellerophon slew while riding the flying horse Pegasus. Today, the town is quiet and turtles breed on the beach. I drew this picture in the breezy early evening, using some transfer dots and lines to suggest the grainy texture of rapidly waning sunlight.

Although I usually prefer a pencil or watercolor-like feel to my drawings, when I awoke to this scene outside our Cirali window, I wanted to use bold colors and shapes to express the brilliance and seeming flatness of the flowers overlapping the chickens and lemon trees. Naturally, the wide variety of tools in an iPad app like Sketches can easily accommodate this kind of change in style.

Family walking past ruins to beach

On our return to Antalya, we spent an afternoon at the gorgeous site of ancient Phaselis, which was once a major harbor city and now comfortably crumbles in a pinewood park. This was a quick sketch from my perch on a Roman wall, just before a line of ants drove me off. The figures are a bit awkward, but I think I conveyed something of the filtered sunlight romantically highlighting the ruined main boulevard.

Beach with ruins

On the edge of the woods, the extensive ruins of Phaselis give way to lovely beach views. You can see in the distance here one of the touristic “pirate ships” that have lately sprung up all over the Turkish coast.

Hagia Sophia

I had been wanting to take a stab at drawing Hagia Sophia for some time, and I got my chance during the one afternoon we were able to spend in Istanbul on our way home to Texas. I plunked down on the first shady bench I could find and fell to drawing whatever I could see, which at times seemed to be the population of the world – it being a spring Saturday in the Sultanahmet district, which must be the most popular tourist destination in all of Turkey. Once again, I reveled in the scene for an hour or so, capturing what I could and sitting virtually unnoticed by the throngs.

I love the iPad for onsite sketching, given that I have been an amateur artist who previously only rarely found the time or nerve for it and who would still find it overly cumbersome, time consuming, and disruptive to work out in the world with traditional art materials. The iPad makes some things a lot easier, but I would not like to leave the impression that an app is so magical that artistic ability and vision become irrelevant. In addition to the possibility of an app crash, there are some real difficulties involved in iPad creation as compared to traditional methods, for example its less accurate drawing capability, unusually smooth, specular, small, and sometimes annoyingly smudgy surface, and one’s inability to work in full sun or even the lightest of drizzles. As with any medium, if you want to succeed, you must accommodate or overcome its limitations and exploit its strengths. What I know is that as long as I’m still learning, enjoying, and feeling gratified by the results, I’ll remain an enthusiastic advocate!

Leslie Akchurin is a New Englander who currently resides in Lubbock, Texas, where she instructs in a university writing center.  More of her iPad work can be seen here.

*Readers – Do you sketch using Digital media? What app do you use and why?