1 Simple Way to Experiment and Revise Your Work

Use Digital tools

You don’t have to enjoy making digital art to benefit from using digital tools to experiment and quickly revise your work. Start by creating your work in whatever medium you prefer, for me, that’s painted paper and collage. After you’ve made the work, photograph it, and then begin to explore it digitally. Using digital tools allows you to try many ideas on your work, without doing anything to the physical piece. Once you have a better understanding of the changes that you want to make, put the digital tools away, and move back to the physical work, using your digital experiment as a reference.

Here’s a simple example

I started by creating a collage with painted paper. The original intent for this work was to have fun creating and to brainstorm ideas and color combinations for ice cream cones, so even though this met my original objective, I decided to explore.

I used Adobe Express, to quickly remove the background, and then used Canva to add shapes. Doing this, gave me ideas of how I might explore further in my next round of collage work. These digital experiments are fast and low risk. If I don’t like the result, I can hit delete and try something else, and the original work is intact.

Change the size and create combinations

Take parts of artwork that you’ve done in the past and explore new combinations. What ideas does that prompt for you? Combining your artwork in new ways, is always a great tool to create your own reference images.