The iPad lets you interact directly with your device with your fingertips, which makes the experience feel uncomplicated, natural and tactile. But some users prefer using a stylus, and some use a mixture depending on the task at hand. So when do you need a stylus and how do you pick one?

My Experience

Touchscreen computing really appeals to me. Finger painting feels very intuitive to me and I prefer to use my fingers to do everything on the iPad, except writing. That’s when I like to use a stylus.

There’s something about the angle you hold a pen that becomes part of your handwriting. The way your writing forms a unit, from one word to another and from one passage to another. It’s different than writing with your fingers when it becomes more about drawing each individual character, like writing in sand, and you don’t get quite the same flow writing with your fingers as you do when you write with a pen.

Choosing a Stylus

Here’s a useful comparison of 12 different styli to help you pick one that suits you. Check out the video and for more depth, the companion article Drawing on the iPad: 12 touchscreen styluses reviewed and see what you think. While I haven’t tried all the styli featured in Macworld’s comparison, I’ll be back with an article on the styli that I find useful for painting and writing.

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Top 20 Apps to Turn Your iPad into a Portable Creative Studio

Tags: handwriting, iPad, iPhone, review, stylus, tools, touchscreen

Dreamboard. Full Harvest Moon. October 2009.

A Dreamboard for the Full Harvest Moon. Layers of transformation, expanding creative expressions, painting, photography, writing, type… The past, the present. And finding a focus for the future.

I was standing in the museum of a castle ruin, reading fascinating (no I’m not being sarcastic) and informative text on those typical museum boards, when suddenly the graffiti on the wall behind the board caught my attention. Or rather came forward to me, like a wave of text, like light, layers and layers of graffiti carved onto the stone wall. And I started to photograph the graffiti, going from room to room, floor to floor, captivated by it, following its light, and forgetting everything else… The earliest date I found was 1609, and the most recent was 2009. It was like a living memorial to all those people. I imagined each person writing their name on the wall, carving glorious moments of stolen kisses, or writing a “here I am, I exist” in the middle of an everyday experience… I wondered if people ever recalled, later on, the moment when they crafted that graffiti…

When I returned from my journey to Öland, my best friend wanted to see my photos from my trip, but I mostly have loads of photos of this graffiti from the castle… One of the images, the one below, was the starting point for this collage, and was meant to be the focal point, and yet it didn’t make it in! Somehow it just got to be too much.

Here is a desktop wallpaper and an October desktop calendar version of my Harvest Moon dreamscape.

Centuries of layered graffiti on the wall of a castle ruin.

Tags: collage, creative process, dreams, grafitti, handwriting, history, layers, letters, making wishes, orange, purple, vintage, watercolours