As a small business owner, the task list is never ending. Despite the fact that I use my artwork in my business, I still feel a twinge of guilt when I do it.There are remnants of my New England Yankee upbringing that whisper I cannot possibly be doing work if it’s that much fun. So I find other ways to trick myself into allowing myself to spend time doing my art.

Omnisketch was hard to control when I was trying to draw fish with it. I noticed how much fun it was just to randomly drag the pen around. Then I found the mirroring tool. Suddenly, it got my attention. Not in a takes my brain to think way, rather in a distract the monkey mind and provide some focus kind of way. Now playing with my ipad has purpose….

It’s also fun to change the background colors and watch how your perception of all the colors shift in relationship to the change. At least for a color theory fiend like me!

Like digital photography, painting digitally gives me a lot more feeling of freedom to try stuff and push myself. Without directly using up supplies, I am less worried about ‘wasting’ things, and will push myself to do things like work out of my normal palette color range. Overall, I just feel looser and more likely to just play without feeling the same pressure to do something well.

I used to be afraid of snakes. Then I thought about it. They are incredibly beautiful, and have patterns on them. I love patterns. So I decided to love the patterns on snakes. I started painting and drawing them, and it changed my understanding of them. I used my curiosity and appreciation of one aspect to transform my relationship to them.

Now if I can just remember to do that with all the people I meet.

I continue to participate in Creative Every Day, even when I don’t post every day. This month the theme is Blue.

I was determined to do something with Auryn Ink, the iPad app that I had the most trouble with in my fish project. It was much more suited to a free flowing image, working with the qualities the app naturally presented.

Inspire Pro	Inspire Pro	Art Rage
Art Rage	Brushes	Brushes
Brushes	Auryn Ink	Auryn Ink
Auryn Ink	Procreate	Procreate
OmniSketch	OmniSketch	OmniSketch

This certainly has been an interesting experiment for me, on several levels. I learned a lot about the various apps. While I can see potential in each one, Brushes is by far the easiest for me to feel some competency using. I get the cleanest colors and most predictable marks. I’m not giving up on the others, just recognizing I will need to work with them a lot more.

By working on a similar image in each program, I have a much clearer idea of what each app is going to be best at, and where it’s going to be challenging. I think I got to this understanding much faster by doing this, than if I had just done a series of random unrelated images.

It was a bit unnerving to post my first sketches, things that would normally get deleted or kept only as a learning tool. It was helpful in letting go of another layer of perfectionism in any form.

Here is the whole series:

Inspire Pro Fish
Art Rage Fish
Brushes Fish
Auryn Ink Fish
Procreate Fish
OmniSketch Fish