I seriously started my Artsy project in mid-2023. For a few months, it was almost exclusively freehand doodling. That got my confidence up that I could at least do rudimentary hand-to-eye coordination. I have created a collage of these sketches above, and they are on Mosaic Wall. As almost everyone knows, to be good at anything takes PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE. Some of the things I attempted in those first three months were just plain awful. They stayed out of the trash can for about 3 seconds after they were completed. But, they served a purpose. They were learning experiences.

The first dozen mosaics in my Mosaic Wall are in the analog-artsy stage. Before I go any further, I need to explain just what the Analog Artsy stage is:

Analog Artsy is basically doing things the old-fashioned way (i.e. without apps). I took an iPhone picture of the flowers on the piano of our entrance lounge area in my RetCom, and then put a piece of tracing paper on top of the photograph, to trace out the basic image I wanted to convey. From there, I experimented with several different media for the next step. This included: colored pencils, marking pens, water color and acrylic paint. I must say that I was near giving up, due to how messy most of these methods were.

I finally settled on marking pens. But the problem I found it that I never seemed to have the right shade of color that I wanted. Currently, the first dozen pictures on my Mosaic wall in this mode. If I hadn’t been a techie who knew how painting/drawing apps were, I might have remained in the “marking pen” mode.

Long story short – I persisted in the analog mode for about three months before I moved on to consider going digital. After experimenting with a half dozen digital apps, I decided, for the most part, to use digital as my primary source for artsy. But, I still plan to occasionally pull out my pens for doodling and sketching.

In a near future post, I will be telling you about which digital tools/apps I experimented with and which ones I ultimately chose.