sketching faces on the iPad - quick and fun!

Remember the iPad hubby gifted me for my birthday and my wanting to stretch out of technological complacency?

Am I ever having fun with it!

I thought I'd be experimenting with this new-to-me technology by playing with electronic notebooks and I am, but oh I found something much more fun: an electronic painting & drawing application.

The app is called Art Set. It turns your iPad screen into an electronic canvas or sketchbook, offering you choices of paper (colour & texture), drawing/painting tools (oil paint, pastel, pen, crayon, marker, etc.), and colours. It even includes a few blending tools.

It is so. much. fun.

I got hooked on its convenience and started using it to do sketching blitzes of faces, quickly drawn caricature-looking faces. Each day I try to spend 15-30 minutes doing these quick sketches using the app and my fancy schmancy stylus pen.

It's great fun, great practice and it's already served me in my "real" painting.

Of course I could have done the same thing with a paper sketchbook, but I didn't. The iPad was apparently the chosen prompt.

Sooooo, given how much I like destinations I have given myself a goal: 100 of these iPad faces to present in a final product, most likely here in the form of a slide show. I'm secretly targeting the end of April to complete them, but shhhhhhh... I'm not ready to commit to that quite yet.

After nine days I have 65 sketches, 35 of them I like enough to include in the final product.

This is not about perfection; this is all about practice, play and the satisfaction that comes out of meeting a goal. It's also about learning how new technology can serve me instead of me resisting it.

All that for a pen with a rubber tip and a 99-cent app.

Stay tuned...