One thing I'm trying to do more often when painting is use real-world references and gather sources of information, I've seen a lot of tools to aid with this but they all either had OS limitations (MacOS/IPad only) or just didn't gel with my existing workflows, on top of that I was loathe to use yet another tool to keep my life in order. With all that in mind I decided this was the perfect time to dig deeper into the world of Obsidian.
Why Obsidian?
One of the major things I wanted was access on all of my devices, Obsidian is great for that, it has apps on every OS you can imagine as well as Android and iOS.
Secondly I preferred it to be offline first, when I'm out and about it's really useful to be able to snap a pic and add it to my reference repo. Obsidian is local-first with optional sync capabilities, fitting this target perfectly.
My Setup
First things first I have a top level folder which contains all of my mini painting projects. It's prefixed with 300 to help me order it amongst my other projects and notes.
The project directories are prefixed in order that I'm doing them (broadly). Each directory looks something like this:
The links file is pretty self explanatory, it's a list of links relevant to the project, these are things like materials to buy, in the case of contests this could include rules and previous contest galleries:
This brings me onto the feather in the cap of Obsidian, Canvases.
Canvases
Canvases are infinitely scrolling files, they can be used similarly to mindmaps with notes linking to other notes. They can also be used to gather screenshots together like a mood board. I tend to use them in 2 ways either as a mood board gathering references to help drive the project:
Or I use them to gather guides and videos in one place, you're able to group cards together under one label and then drag them around the canvas as one block, if I do this I'll group them by themes and techniques e.g. NMM, OSL etc.:
Summary
This is abit more of a top level overview of how I use Obsidian, if there's interest in a deeper dive I'll post a follow up article.