Architect Stephen West considered himself “a dinosaur” when it came to new technology. So much so, when his youngest son Britten gave him an iPad as a present in April 2010 his first reaction was: “What the hell is this?”Fast-forward 18 months later and Mr West, of Westport Architecture, is somewhat of a whizz on the Apple device, spending hours a day producing elaborate works of i-art.“I have learned a lot in the last year. I couldn’t even e-mail, now I e-mail and do everything so it’s a lot of fun.”These days he is using the art skills he first learned as a child, and mastered during his 44-year career as an architect, to produce detailed portraits and landscapes on his iPad.Some pieces he draws freehand and take about 20 minutes; others he has to sketch meticulously and can take up to 100 hours to complete.Mr West is also preparing to take his unique art form public. He has launched a website selling some of his favourite pieces; and on March 23 his work will be featured in an exhibit at the Bermuda Society of Arts.“The learning curve is massive. You can’t believe what you can do with [the iPad] and it just goes on and on and never stops.“I am so proud of this. To be able to do this is mind-boggling I can’t believe some of the pieces I can create and I can’t believe how far I’ve come.”Mr West first started taking art classes at the Hamilton Hotel when he was eight years old. By age 16 he had started dabbling with painting, but eventually got overwhelmed with the stresses of his job and just stopped.“I just didn’t have the time while doing architecture,” he said.But his passion was reignited about a month after getting the iPad from his son. Mr West started experimenting with the different applications and fell in love with the drawing programmes.“Just the mystique of it is incredible. When I first started it was just a scribble and a line here and there.“Then one day I did a scribble and saw a duck in [the design]. That’s when I said I am going to hone this.“Over the past year I have taught myself everything. Every day I learn something and it’s so fascinating. I learn something and I say I have to do that again so I don’t lose it.”Some of his great works are copies of pieces by famous artists such as Raoul Dufy. Mr West said: “If I showed you the original you would have a hard time telling them apart.”When he was younger he took up sailing and cricket as hobbies, but said i-art has now become his favourite past-time.“It’s very therapeutic it calms me right down. The architecture business is very high-stress, you are constantly stressed out. This is reversed. This is a total shut down as they say in cricket.“When you’re playing well you get into the zone and nothing can stop you [in the sport] and that is what happens here you get into a zone when you’re alone with your iPad.”He said it was “so much fun” to create something new, but his problem lies in his need to be perfect: “I won’t let anything go until I think it’s the best it can be.”There are also some challenges of working with iPad and other new media.While jet-lagged from returning home on a long trip, Mr West accidentally pressed a button deleting nearly 80 pieces of his art work.“I was shaking. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. They were all things that I had painted and they had all of a sudden gone into thin air and I couldn’t get it back. I was gutted.“I had also lost everything that I had put into it. Every single one of these has something of me in it I presume.”He sent the iPad to a specialist group in California to try and recover some of the deleted items, but they were lost in cyberspace.“To get it back would have cost $1400 and it would have been worth every penny to me at that time because I lost a lot of stuff.”He said he has had some criticism from artists who don’t consider the new media an art form, but Mr West believes his attention to detail and precision prove otherwise.“You are putting elements together to make compositions of a painting. It’s not art by [everyone’s] terms because I do not have paint and a brush or a canvass, but how about an artist that just draws with a pencil? So how do you define it?”“This is a new medium so why can’t others see it as art? I think I have probably taken it into a step further where it can be.”To view or purchase Mr West’s work visit www.bermuda-iart.com.