I’m always keen to try an indoor hobby, and usually around the time of the Apple live events and keynotes, I suddenly have a craving to make maximum use of my iPad. I’ve previously been dipping into coding, making apps, learning Swift, etc, which I love, but the last few weeks I’ve been looking for something a bit more relaxing, a bit less taxing.

Step forward then - drawing and art. I’m a terrible artist, I can see things in my head how I want them to be but something always gets lost in translation on its way to the medium. The iPad is great for that because it’s so easy to delete the evidence. I was scouting around for a good tutorial app and stumbled across the highly-rated ShadowDraw.

The concepts are simple here, you follow a guided tutorial, showing you where to draw and how it comes together. I’m not too sure how effective this is in actually learning how to draw, but it’s definitely a peaceful pastime, and quite satisfying when you see what you’ve created at the end.

The app has launched a special advent calendar event - a new winter drawing every day for 25 days in December, and doing something daily is a great way to get me properly hooked. The first day was a reindeer head, let’s see what the rest of the month brings!