Experimenting with digital drawing
- Katie Shaw
- Dec 28, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
This post looks at how I use digital drawing as part of my photographic practice, working in Photoshop with a Wacom drawing tablet to draw over the images made while on my adventures. The process brings together photography, GPS tracking, and drawn lines. Using layering as a way to explore movement, landscape, personal experience/observations and memory. The drawings are built up gradually. GPS routes recorded on Strava from walks and surf sessions are traced and reworked over the photographs, turning movement through space into a visible line. These routes function less as precise data and more as a record of presence. A mark of where I have been or observed being.
The drawings are built up gradually. GPS routes recorded on Strava from walks and surf sessions are traced and reworked over the photographs, turning movement through space into a visible line. These routes function less as precise data and more as a record of presence. A mark of where I have been or observed being.
Working digitally allows for constant adjustment, erasing error and working in layer. The act of drawing becomes a reflective act which mirrors the physical rhythm of activity. Using my Wacom tablet allows the drawing process, for me, to remain hand drawn, despite the digital approach. The lines are traced over the top of images in photoshop where I create a layer and isolate the lines from the image, then transferring onto the photos and editing to how I want it to look wit blending modes etc…
Alongside the routes, I also draw nature’s contour lines referencing topographic maps of land and seascapes shown in the photographs. These lines borrow from traditional cartographic maps but are intentionally hand drawn for my own feel. The placement of the lines onto the photo varies depending on the image, dependant on shapes, subjects etc… within the images. I play with the placement until the two almost co-exist, while keeping the hand drawn feel.
The topographic contour lines drawn reference hills, mountains, and I am looking into coastal barometric lines (relating to depth) present in nature. These lines sit between mapping and mark-making. They are informed by real topography lines which I trace onto the image digitally to keep them as accurate as I can. This process flattens different systems of representation – photography, cartography, GPS data, and drawing onto an image. By layering over the images with drawn data elements, the work documents and interprets my own memory and nature’s memory of the landscape observed and experienced during my adventures. The images become sites where lived experience of both of these things intersecting and helps offer an alternative understanding to place and memory.
