I have been trying to merge the digital and the manual for many years. Specifically, I began to buy digital sketching devices around 2012. I had used a Wacom tablet a couple of times but looking at the screen while moving your hand in another universe did not replicate the natural fluency of drawing for me. And so, in 2012 I bought the “Inkling”, a strange hybrid device which allowed you to sketch on paper with a rather fat ballpoint pen, while a sensor, clipped to the edge of the paper, converted those movements into bitmap files.
The fluency was wonderful. It was easy to capture my natural drawing style. But size was very limited by the range of the sensor. There was no way to go back and add to something you were doing yesterday, and the whole business of setting it up and downloading the files was quite cumbersome. The initial promise faded and it fell into disuse. I did use the sketches in a couple of blog posts and was rather proud of the extra punch I could get…