How my Smartphone opened Up a Wonderful New Frontier for my Art

A little more than a year ago – I upgraded to a Smartphone # technocrats: ditched my ancient flip-phone and couldn’t believe the difference. Before my Smartphone era, whenever I used to go out for reference pictures I used to carry a case that held my drawing materials, laptop, paper notebook, digital camera, cell phone, and more. It was not light. Today, it is just the Smartphone and it could perform all my tasks and back at work, I can flip through the images and see if anything can help me with my next project.

I have several To Do lists and the most important for me are those related to my art and what I need to do next. I find it useful to collect them all at the same place and my Smartphone is the one tool I always have on me. Nowadays I always “carry” in my Smartphone a master list of blog ideas and update it every time a new idea pops up and refer to it whenever I am out of ideas.

To my delight, touch screen Smartphone’s can be art tools also. First grey out any white background as you would on an easel, make sure you have an app with adjustable brushes, and work by adding layers. If all that fails, use the undo button frequently. And the results - a visual feast.

One feature that I didn’t know about my Smartphone - is using it as a WiFi hotspot, my daughter said, this is called tethering. The only tether I knew was to tie (an animal) with a rope or chain so as to restrict its movement.

This tethering was basically sharing the data connection with other devices, similar to how we use the WiFi at hotels or a coffee shop. And so I head to Settings > Tethering & Hot spot (or settings > more) on my Android Smartphone and enabled the hot spot feature, and viola! My phone shared its connection with my Laptop. But hey, let me remind you, it seems many service providers charge extra for this, so double check before you start streaming movies to your laptop.

Being an artist is a lot of fun. It’s also one of the few hobbies and jobs out there where you can express yourself how you want. Believe it or not, you can produce art from your Android devices with some great Android apps for artists.