Synaesthesia and Marrying the Best of the Analogue with the Merits of the Digital World
I have always loved the concept of synaesthesia, ever since I learned about it in school when we listened to The Beatles’ “Lucy in the sky with diamonds”. Even before, music had played a role for me in terms of inspiration and contributing to a unity of senses and multi-sensory perception of colour and music. I saw colours when I listened to music and tried to capture them with lines, shapes and colours to create the visual equivalent to an auditory experience.
Drawing to music has eventually turned to drawing for music, e.g. for creating art to accompany recordings of friends’ bands or my own, but still interacting with the music – listening, responding, revising, editing, et cetera.
The gear and tools in terms of pencils are literally the instruments that enhance the experience and I am glad to have found ones that have become trusted companions over the years in different contexts.
Staedtler was founded almost two hundred years ago in Nuremberg, Germany with the aim to create high-quality, crafted pencils and has since established itself firmly on the firmament of art utensil producers by turning ideas into products.
What I like about Staedtler’s gear is that it is a symbiosis of tradition and innovation with specifically their Design Journey range providing vibrantly coloured fibre-tip pens, pigment fineliners in a range of sizes and my favourite, i.e. metallic markers for both the artistic voyage of the creative pro as well as the uninitiated for drawing, colouring, illustrating and writing.
For more technical drawing endeavours, Staedtler’s DIN A 3 sized drawing board has become a permanent fixture on my desk as its parallel drafting arm the convenient single-hand double locking mechanism make it idea to lock in accurately any position on the rail. The ruler runs smoothly along neat features like a scale with needle hole for precise compass radius setting contribute to facilitating precise work.
Now, with pretty much everything have gone digital, in some areas innovative solutions are incepted to recreate the original feel and Staedtler’s Noris digital does exactly that: Looking and feeling exactly like a normal pencil, it serves as a stylus for tablets, smartphones and notebooks to be used on displays. In other words, a digital pencil using an electromagnetic field generated by the display of the device to interact with it inductively.
Ergonomically shaped and made of wood based materials, it reacts sensitively to pressure and feels like an analogue pencil, including a soft digital eraser, which makes it ideal for old school digital artists – the epitome of marrying the merits of the analogue world with the benefits of digitization.
