Hot Forge- Painting in Autodesk Sketchbook with the IPad Pro

I’ve been working in my father’s shop a lot this past year, helping as a shop hand with some larger production forging he’s picked up. When handling large volumes of metal, it helps to have a second set of hands.

​This week we’ve been building tooling to optimize mass production. A lot of folks see a big man swinging a hammer when they think blacksmith, but when it comes to making a bunch of the same stuff, building some tooling really saves time. We’re making things like various diameters of pins for bending, allowing us to replicate the same bends across bunches of parts. 

Part of my efforts extend into online shop and social media management for the business which means I’m taking a lot of photos, and gathering a lot of reference for some paintings. 

Below you can see a painting I did based on the above picture. The night I painted this, we were finishing “Million Dollar Baby” on DVD, internet is still cutting out. I’m really pleased with the ipad’s Ability to keep up with my hatchy strokes, the surface 3 always had trouble keeping up. Using a rough gauche like brush in Autodesk Sketchbook, I painted this on one layer, color picking from the reference picture here and there to keep things close. 

Thanks for readin’, we’ll see ya next time!