The illustrator with the wrong stroke who took his revenge thanks to an iPad
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The use of the term “Pro” as an abbreviation of “professional” to indicate the flagship devices of a range of smartphones or tablets is a widespread and consolidated practice in the tech sector. In the case of Apple, for example, the suffix applies to the top-of-the-range iPhones and iPads on which the company brings the latest innovations and the most advanced features, which over time will also arrive on lower-end models.
But who really are the “pros” these features are intended for? Critics will say that to speak of “Pro” as meaning professional, particularly in the case of iPads, is misleading, because no one really “works” with an iPad like they would a Mac. It’s a narrow view of what “professional” means. which considers only office applications, programming, or other activities that iPadOS does not yet allow to manage with the same flexibility as a Mac or a PC as digital work.
iPad Pro and the illustration
But there’s a large demographic of professionals who are working with iPad Pros in entirely new ways. They are photographers, musicians, designers, and more generally multimedia creative professionals for whom the tablet has represented a real revolution in the approach to work. This is the case, for example, of Giovanni Esposito, aka Quasirosso, illustrator and writer of graphic novels who has made the iPad Pro his notebook and his palette.
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Quasirosso’s career begins to grow thanks to a simple idea: five years ago, after his first jobs as a professional illustrator, he opens a Facebook page where he can publish his strips and drawings. The follow-up arrives quickly, with more than ten thousand followers in three months, and consequently also the first recognitions and the first offers of editorial collaboration. Today Esposito has four books to his credit, about 120,000 followers on Instagram, and is divided between his work as a graphic novel writer and creative collaborations.
“I discovered digital illustration on the iPad in 2017. I was doing a digital coloring course and the teacher suggested I try Apple’s Pro tablet», Esposito tells Italian Tech. «I still remember that after a long search I found some one used in Rome, an old 12.9″ model that I bought with the money from my first advance: it was everything I expected, and even more”.
From tablet to tablet
Since then Esposito has dedicated himself 100% to digital illustration, which before then meant working with a graphics tablet and Mac.
“Ease of use was the fundamental difference compared to the tablet: with the iPad I don’t have to go through the mental process of the type “ok, now I’ll sit down and get to work”, says Esposito. “I take the iPad in my hand wherever I am and I start drawing. With another great advantage: compared to the graphics tablet, on the iPad I place the pen directly on the screen, I can observe what I’m doing directly, it’s one step less than the computer display. This helped me bring my signature line, a bit shaky and not too precise, to digital.”
The professors of the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples had repeated to Giovanni many times that he had to change that trait, that it was a problem to be solved. Then one day he discovers Egon Schiele: “Wait, I said to myself, then you can paint like this too! I kept that mark, studied it, elaborated it and made it mine”.
Bringing the line from paper to the iPad Pro screen wasn’t an immediate process, though. “It wasn’t easy at first. Everything I did seemed too perfect and aseptic, too “digital” if you’ll forgive me the term». The solution was to learn how to digitalize the same mistakes and imperfections that arise on paper. “I had to study and understand my mistakes to learn how to replicate them on a perfection-oriented device. It’s a process that has taught me the profound value ofim-perfection. It is precisely the error that makes digital illustration alive and real. The iPad helped me thanks to an ease of use that I hadn’t found in other tools”.
The upgrade
After five years of honorable service, Esposito retired his aging iPad Pro last month for an iPad Pro M2. Not without some anxiety: «I was afraid of abandoning the old Pencil, the one with the Lightning connection. The fact that you had to stick the iPad to load it wasn’t the best and I broke several. But that pencil had a perfect balance and I wasn’t entirely sure that the new one was up to it». While he was telling me this detail on videocall, Quasirosso twirled the new stylus between his fingers. “It was enough for me to pick it up once and make this movement to understand that I would have liked it a lot. For me this is the detail that makes the Apple Pencil different from the others: the way they are perfectly balanced, how they fit in the hand. It is a detail, but for an illustrator it is fundamental”.
In addition to the Pencil, Esposito’s other tool of choice is the Procreate drawing app, on which he creates all his tables. “I only happen to pick up a pencil and paper again when I know I want to concentrate hard and not think about anything else for a while,” he explains. «Otherwise in most cases I open the iPad and start drawing. All my professional works are now born digitally. The other fundamental aspect for me is portability: the tablet is always with me, almost all of Indaco’s designs were born this way”.
Digital graphic novel
Indaco, released in October by Feltrinelli, is the latest graphic novel by Quasirosso. Six seemingly unconnected characters travel on a minibus, each with a secret, towards an unsettling discovery. “The inspiration for the Indaco van, so to speak, came to me in Tallinn, in a fast food restaurant. It was the toy included in my girlfriend’s kids menu. I had the iPad with me, I took it out of my backpack and immediately drew it. Other tables were born in Puglia, others in still different places, while I was travelling. I could never have done the same thing with paper and colors. If only because I’m too messy and would have lost the drawings along the way. On the iPad they are all automatically saved and backed up”.
There is only a small passage of his work which for now is still related to the computer. “When I do the animations or edit the Reels for Instagram, the final step is still in Final Cut,” concludes Giovanni. “I could try using iPad software for the same purpose but I have my own established method. I’m waiting for DaVinci Resolve to arrive (professional editing software; already announced, it should arrive by the end of 2022 ed) so that I can use the iPad 100% for everything I do”.
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