One of my biggest ‘problems’ with digital art has been the fact it has more constraints than non-digital art. When I am working with non-digital art I usually have a sketch book and some kind of composition book or journal handy so I can cross reference ideas with my actual drawing or reference Zentangles I’m practicing, etc. With digital, all this falls apart and becomes A Problem as digital forces less ‘scattered about the pages’ and more ‘hierarchical folder and file structure’.
Due to digital art requiring more rigid structures for how I catalog and interact with art, I struggle badly as that’s not how my mind works and interact with my dot to dot, coloring, Zentangle and drawing work. I need something a bit more flexible than a computers tree’d folder structure and I definitely need metadata stored with my art so I can find things and review things at a later point (basically I need competent search and tags).
There are very few options for setting up digital art in a form that is flexible, easily searched/indexed and managed in a non-rigid fashion. Thankfully Obsidian exists as a knowledge management system / knowledge base, has good features that help with visualization and generally Just Works. It also uses markdown to store your note data allowing you to avoid vendor lock in.
Over the course of a couple weeks I was able to create a Digital Art Composition Book within Obsidian that allows me to more reliably find art, track progress and more. It’s proven to be very flexible and greatly closed the gap between digital and non-digital workflows for me. This Obsidian setup feels a lot like my analog art notebooks and I can even open the Obsidian files on my e-book reader (Boox Palma) to cross reference information while I use my Android Tablet (Samsung Z Fold 4 with S Pen) for whatever digital art I’m working on.
If you’re interested in trying my setup and/or using it for yourself, it can be downloaded from my personal git forge here or from GitHub here. I have the files in the git version control system so folk can track any changes I make over time and so I can have a proper history of how the system evolves as I use it. It’s available for non-commercial use and I hope folk who give it a try find it helpful.
Some screen shots of the setup:
