✍️The newsletter: Feedback for Conservators #8
A FREE digital tool for art conservators: iArtbook®
This newsletter project comes from the mentorship service Feedback for Conservators: a place to bring a little bit of professional feedback to help on subjects that I wish I knew more about, especially (but not only) at the start of my art conservator career. Topics discussed here are recurrent ones that I see over Zoom sessions! so I thought would be useful to address them in a short and more informal format. In between, shorter posts with a digital free tool will be discussed. New publications will be out twice a month, for a year.
And just as a reminder: this is not a perfect newsletter and doesn’t intend to, but rather a space to offer some help. Read here past newsletters. And as aaaalways, some disclamers1
This is the fourth edition of this newsletter’s section dedicated to showcasing “free digital tools discoveries” for art conservators. We have already seen: Concepts®, Figma® and the CRBMC Manuals. Today: iArtbook.
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Quick note from marta:
🤝 This post is written by our first guest, Clara Nabet. Clara is a French painting conservation student at the Sorbonne (Paris, France) currently doing her Master’s. She’s deeply interested in art conservation advocacy through Social Media and currently takes care of the Social Media and Communication of Sorbonne’s CR students association Icosaèdre. She is most active on Instagram, where she shares her daily life as a conservation student.
A while ago she mentioned this tool in the comments of this past post. Therefore, I asked her if she would like to explain to us a little bit more about it, since seems quite interesting! P.S. Write back if you want to write here about another cool tool.
I hand now the torch to Clara:
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😎 iArtbook® in a nutshell (by Clara Nabet)
I am an avid IPad user for the flexibility it offers me as a conservation student: not only for note taking and file keeping but also for turning into a drawing tablet when needed, which is tremendously useful for efficient and streamlined condition reports. It is great for students and conservators on the go (as most conservators are). Today I’m presenting to you my favourite iPad sketching app, iArtbook.
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iArtbook® is a free drawing and sketching app for iPad. It can be used to produce all visual conservation documentation, including condition and technical reports and image manipulation.
Conceived as a free alternative to Procreate® or Adobe Photoshop®, its simple interface takes on its most prominent features:
Drawing and painting with a host of brushes that you can fine-tune to infinity (dry, wet, pixel art, and most things in between),
Using layers that you can move around, merge, and transform.
You can cut, copy, paste and move parts of an image and import any picture you like as a base or as a layer.
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Why It is cool for art conservators
It hosts significantly fewer options than Procreate or Photoshop but it’s plenty when it comes to drawing up condition report surveys (Fig. 1). It is a free app after all. Like most free apps, once in a while, an ad pops up when you save a file, but it isn’t at all frequent. There does not seem to be a paying option to make them go away but they are rare enough that it has not bothered me.
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As far as saving your files, iArtbook offers different very useful options. You can save as PNG (with transparency), as JPEG (without transparency), as ARTWORK (including all layers), as PSD, and copy to animation, though that may not be the most useful option.
Compatibility: iArtbook is made for and tailored to the iPad and the Apple Pencil. It is available on iOS and usable on an iPhone but I do think you need the large screen to enjoy its potential to the fullest. Android users be careful, however - an app with the same name and a similar logo exist on the Google Play Store but it is paying and wasn’t made by the same developer. I cannot vouch for its quality and am only discussing here the iOS version.
If you’re like me and are passionate about contributing to the visibility of conservation online, it even includes video recording for your best condition report time-lapses! 😍That means that without having to record your iArtbook session, it can automatically export your process as a video you can save. See Fig. 2 with the link to an example of its use.
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Some thoughts
While iArtbook can be very useful for condition reports, you can imagine it isn’t its intended use. Therefore, it does lack a few key features I think would help:
There are no text options, which means any text has to be added afterwards through any other app. This can be quite tedious for such a routine step in image manipulation.
There isn’t any way to control a straight line either when the built-in iPad Notes app includes a ruler, which makes it superior in that regard.
The colour selection process is a bit weird: the app offers a lot of very arbitrary palettes, which I assume are great for painting and illustration but lack the primary colours. You can also use a colour wheel or sliders to get the exact colour you want. The iPad notes app offers a default palette with primary colours you can build upon and is in that respect more practical to use. That being said, you can configure a default palette in the upper right corner of the app but that adds an extra step.
My advice is always the same: dedicate 1 hour to explore, check videos and play with it and then just stick to what you need. Most times we only need to focus on 3-4 things to make it work for you, so let’s not overcomplicate trying to understand aaaall the program. You must use it if it is saving you time on something, not making you lose it.
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Enjoy!
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That’s a wrap for today. Many thanks to Clara! More in two weeks, see you then?
As mentioned, this newsletter supports the mentorship service Feedback For Conservators (here are some testimonials). Also, as part of it, I offer limited Pro-Bono sessions for those colleagues or students who can not afford them. If you’re interested in any of both just email me, promise I do not bite.
This is NOT a sponsored post, just Clara’s personal opinion of this program 😙.