One of my goals for the whole Side Quest Project was to identify new, fulfilling hobbies that align with my values and leave me energized. It’s been too easy for me to tumble into paths of least leisurely resistance after the work day ends: swapping out work screens for play screens to game, watch TV, or lose time scrolling through Reddit.

I’ve enjoyed a great deal of the side quests I’ve tried, particularly artistic activities, like molding figures with polymer clay and painting with watercolors. But the materials required, the setup needed, and the occasional frustration of not being able to finish a project and clean up afterwards means I more often leave those sorts of activities for weekends, and am less likely to pick them up after work.

So that left me with a challenge: find a post-work relaxing activity that isn’t doomscrolling, that involves creativity and art, and doesn’t require tons of supplies and cleanup requirements.

I am a new convert to iPads, having historically been a Kindle Fire user. But the relative performance differences and some evergreen concerns about Amazon as a company (another topic, another time!) left me looking elsewhere for my tablet needs. I grabbed a refurbished iPad from the Apple Store this summer, and added on a stylus so I could test out sketching.

New tablet toy in hand, I got to work with Procreate, an inexpensive app tailor made for iPad sketching. A tour around the app showed me that it would merge the best of multiple worlds that I was comfortable with: sensitive and tactile hand-drawn sketching capabilities on one hand, and Creative Suite-like functionality through layers, filters, and brush customization.

Indulge me in an aside for a moment. When I took art classes in high school, I gravitated towards assignments that involved small scale still life drawings. Portraiture escaped me, for the most part, and my attempts at landscapes fell flat—something about translating a multi-dimensional, textured world into a flat image left those pieces something to be desired.

I felt more comfortable with drawing small objects present in everyday life: water bottles, Pez dispensers, cereal boxes. That I could grasp, touch, and examine these objects meant I could better understand their nooks and crannies, an essential part of translating the object into a picture. In retrospect, I also think I unconsciously enjoyed the meditative practice of observing something so mundane so deeply. The nudge to notice every curve, shadow, and color shift required mindfulness, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary for that yet.

Back to my iPad. I picked up where I left off from high school in my first iPad sketches: I found objects around my house or, need be, photos of small objects. I held and turned over the objects, like a simple mug; I zoomed into and scrutinized the photos. And I drew.

I expected that these drawings would be easier to do consistently, since I didn’t need to set up a table with paper, my watercolor palette, clean water, brushes, and paper towels. (I know from my career in UX that any perceived friction, however small in the grand scheme of things, is enough to stop you from starting, much less completing, a particular action.)

What I didn’t expect was how other elements of digital art would be so helpful to me.

This is only my first foray into using a tablet to create art, so I’m sure this list will grow in time. But in the meantime, a brief list:

Mistakes are reversible. When I paint with watercolors, any mistake is largely irreversible. I can blot up a mistaken drop of paint, but there’s always a risk that droplets of water-saturated paint will bump into each other, muddying colors or mixing to make muted browns. And even with a paper towel blotter, the paper retains the faded memory of the paint that was dropped there.

But with my iPad, a quick “Undo” removes the mistaken swipe or mark. If I’m deep into sketching and realize I forgot to add a layer or need to revise the size of an element, I can tap “Undo” a looooot and revise without penalty (except for the lost progress and time, but no problem there). The cost of trying something is low, and the risk of an irreversible error non-existent. What a gift!

Details can be crisp and much more, well, detailed. With the ability to zoom into my canvas, I can scrawl and add small, almost too-tiny-to-notice details: a shadow, a highlight, a sharp angle, a unique edge. The size of my stylus, however small the tip is, would otherwise never allow me to add in such detail to my canvas without the ability to magnify small parts of the image. It goes without saying that this is not something I found of watercoloring, at least not with the paper or canvas sizes I was using.

The side benefit? Aside from creating more detailed images, the ability to zoom and add said details in requires that I observe the object even more carefully and more mindfully. I can’t as easily explain away not adding in a shadow or highlight by saying, “Well, my brush is too wide for that anyway.”

Colors are adjustable. Any watercolor artist, painter, sculptor, what-have-you will tell you that color mixing can be a long process. And for those who aren’t especially skilled in it (i.e. amateurs like myself), the amount of paint material you lose to trying and failing to make the right shade of blue or green or yellow can get wasteful and expensive. With an iPad, though, I can carefully slide sliders to adjust tone, saturation, brightness, or other elements of color to get the precise and accurate color.

I’ve started a short series on iconic popular culture artifacts. Surprising probably no one, I’ve focused on some iconic props from Seinfeld to start, along with some characters from my favorite films, like Alien. I’ll continue fleshing out that series with more props and objects, and who knows? Maybe I’ll try my hand at selling them.

Ultimately, though, my goal isn’t to monetize something that brings me fulfillment—it’s to draw things that I find interesting in a mindful way, and bring a low-barrier creative practice into my everyday life.