My digital sketchbook is full of experiments, abandoned ideas and things I was excited about once upon a time.
I was going through my iPad the other day, checking out my gallery of work in Procreate. It’s the app I use to work through problems with paintings in progress—to freely explore directions I might take without wasting actual paint.
I upload a photo of the painting and work from there.
What would this look like if I added blue over here? What would happen if I added a figure? Or removed one?
What if I covered up half the painting?
When I’m working on a large piece, this can save me from wasting a whole lot of paint. Or at least allow me to waste it more intentionally.
Not that I actually follow the new plan.
If you’ve been following me you’ll know that’s not how I paint.
I might solve the problem in Procreate, go back to the painting—and do something completely different. The point isn’t to create a digital blueprint to follow. It’s to shake something loose. To see another possibility. To get myself moving again when I’m stuck.
Procreate points me in a direction. Whether I actually go that way is another matter entirely.
That’s why I think of it as a digital sketchbook rather than a planning tool. I can try things, discard them, change my mind and wander off in another direction without sacrificing a tube and a half of perfectly good paint.
Then I go back to the actual painting and do pretty much the same thing—only now there are consequences.The original work in progress often disappears under later layers. Sometimes I push it too far. Sometimes I simply get tired of it and want to move on. I’ve written before about how much I love letting the history of a painting show through.
Sometimes the painting and I have a parting of the ways.
That’s what happened to the painting in the photo above, The Wedding Party.
What you see up there exists solely in digital land. The original collage disappeared under paint and became something else entirely.
And I have absolutely no idea what the final painting was.
So much for leaving a lasting impression…
But back to The Wedding Party
One day, months—or possibly years—later, I was scrolling through my Procreate gallery and stumbled across the bones of this composition.
I stopped.
Hmmmm. Potential!
I liked the figures. I liked the dark area on the right. I liked that striped bit of collage.
What I didn’t like was all the collage noise in the original.
So I started playing with it.
I added digital layers to eliminate what I didn’t like. Simplified areas. Changed others.
Enhanced the faces.
Enhanced the faces?
But Susan, there’s not much to them to begin with.
Ahhh, good of you to notice but trust me, there was a whole lot less of them before.
And slowly, this forgotten little digital sketch became The Wedding Party. And BTW, this is one of those pieces that named itself. It KNEW who it was, even if it took a long time to get there.
Sometimes the good stuff is already there
I wasn’t trying to save the original painting. I was following the bits that still interested me.
The figures.
The dark area.
That striped bit of collage.
That was enough.
And somewhere along the way, the thing I’d abandoned became something I loved.
The Wedding Party went from digital junk languishing in the backwaters of my iPad to one of my best-selling prints.
I even have a 30×30 canvas of it hanging in our dining room.
The original painting is long gone. I don’t even remember what it became.
But the version that technically never existed as a physical painting?
That one survived.
Imagine that!.
This week’s creative prompt
Go looking for something you gave up on.
An old sketch. A bad photo. An unfinished painting. A bit of writing. Something shoved in a drawer or buried in the digital junkyard of your phone or iPad.
Don’t ask whether it’s good.
Find one thing that still interests you.
A color. A line. A shape. A sentence. One little corner.
Then ask:
What if?
And mess with it.
You don’t have to rescue the whole thing.
Steal the good bit and see where it takes you.
Back next week–
