DIGITAL INTEGRATION

Can an analogue drawing be part of a digital workflow?  Is an analogue drawing that becomes part of a digital workflow, still analogue?  Do we need a new term that defines an analogue drawing within this digital workspace?  Does the binary of analogue or digital still apply within this working method?

These pages preach analogue, analogue, analogue. Yet Transparent Drawing is integrated as much as is possible into our digital world.  We draw from digital photos that we took on our devices. We look at that digital photo on our digital screens so as to draw our drawings.  You might take a photo with your camera, and then transfer that to your laptop, at which you look at to draw from.

Once we have made an analogue drawing, we immediately either take a photo or more typically digitally scan the drawing.  So the drawing, now as a digital image, becomes manipulable in the same manner as any other digital image.

Our definition of drawing remains intact:  one hand, one paper, one mind,  But what might be a term for the definition of a drawing that is fully subsumed within the digital?  Draital?  This reminds me of the Jewish toy, draidel.

The term draital helps.  This allows us to keep drawing sacrosanct.  And it allows us to then describe and define what happens to our drawings when they become digital images.  Only a draital can be generated as a drawing.  And as a draital, it has far greater significance as it co exists within the ocean of digital images.  If a designer needs, in the middle of a digital river, to get back to the source, they will look in the folder on their computers with the title, draital.

This page adds to our understanding of drawing within the context of our digital lives.  Some of the pages that touch on this general theme include:
–Practice And The Computer
–Post Digital Drawing
–Digital Love Affair
–Real World Transparent Drawing
–Drawing Not Drawing  On this page we defined the word draughter, which means an image that has been digitally generated and is digitally printed.  A draughter is not a drawing.

I think what we have just proven is that we no longer need to apply the binaries of digital and analogue to everything that we do.  We are starting to develop a middle path between these binaries.  And the new word, draital, is a start at getting us there.

1.  I took the photo above in the MET of Xia Chang’s Bamboo in Wind, which was done in 1460.  My drawing at the top is a form projection based on the geometry of the bamboo plant in the lower left of the photo.