Why digital painting?

[Sweedie]

I have been thinking about this strange thing that happened in my life. Once upon a time in the 60s I started studying art. I wanted to be a commercial artist. We had classical art education for illustrators. But my education was out of time. When I tried to start working with illustration, I was not educated in photographing. So I went to a new art school for painters and photographers and ended up as a teacher in art after 3 more years of education. That makes 7 years of art education! All classical and handmade art.

In the mid 80s I bought my first computer, an Amiga 500, then A600 and an A1200 and a CD32. When the Amiga died I had my first PC in the mid 90's and started using Painter. Ever since mid 80s I am in digital painting. I have been teaching my self all I know in digital painting. No education in that, but a big community of digital painters all learning from each other. DeluxePaint was the hype then in the beginning of the PC era. And it is still a fantastic programme...

What happened when I first tested ArtRage was LOVE, I can not describe it with any other words. AR takes me back to the beginning, it's the same feeling as in the early days of my art career (ooh! those days in the 60s, how I miss them! Sob..) and back to those DeluxePaint days, that were so much fun. Now it is so much fun again. I love computer art once more!

Now, digital painting, why?

First of all it is cheap. You buy a computer anyway. And so you buy a paint programme and a Wacom, and that's it. No more greasy oils, dusty charcoal or chalks.

Secondly, you can sit down and paint whenever you like, no more occupying the kitchen or cleaning the sink from oils and such.

Thirdly, you can animate your art, What a joy! Such fun!

4th. you can communicate with your images, like in this forum...can it be any better?

5th, well, I don't know, surely you can come up with some good arguments...

The developments in digital imaging is so positive..I really wish all people all over the globe had a computer and ArtRage, a fast Internet connection and some nice forums like this to chat an meet...

These are just some thought that came to my mind while sitting in the sun thinking. Soon I'll be back to work 100% and there will not be that much time to spend with ArtRage. But as often as I can I will use AR and I will spread the word about it...

[Alexandra]

Digital painting is such a blast. We recently purchased an I-mac and my wacom software would not load-but I could update the wacom tablet and use it. I miss the software and would love to purchase another tablet just for the great deals on their software-adobe, corel, and more. We are lacking in space, but husband tollerates my paper and paints covering the kitchen table as I must do this to remain sane. Canvas and paints are in the garage because there is enough room to sit and eat-ha! So it is great for me to have this PC in the house where there are no limits!
I love to scan in a picture that I have drawn and use the wonderful techniques offered-especially the plastic effects if it is a fantasty drawing.
I am new to AR and have really enjoyed reading the posts and looking at all of the beautiful art work.
Looking forward to an education with you all.

[Sweedie]

I can't wait for your images! A PC does it, it's my way to get along too. Since the paper and canvases are always in the way a nice and clean PC is tolerable for my family too. I guess an I-Mac is alright in its design and does not disturb, as good looking and as my silent Shuttle? How long will it take before your first AR painting will appear in this forum?

[Aged P]

With ArtRage canvases are soooooooooo cheap as well!

Welcome from an ex kitchen/garage painter. No more dark blue paint marks all over the house! Was it always dark blue with you too?

[sbug51]

well, i learned how to draw back in school, i dont really know the age (bad in math) but i started to learn when i was in my o-levels (IG1) then i stopped taking classes after a year thats when i finished my o-levels (IG1 + IG2) i didn't take A-level art class, cause my parents said that they dont want to see a passing mark for it (i was good guys dont worry ;)) and it would have really made a big pressure trying to finish the rest! (whats funny i took A-level math and got a B+ or B cant remember exactly)

but what drew me to digital drawing was...(like 8 years ago) i knew a friend she was really great at drawing, and her cousin kept talking about (another friend of mine) her art and how she draws and stuff, thats when i was introduced to wacom and tablets, but my parents didn't want to buy me one cause they thought that i wont use it (so i thought i will make money and prove to them that i will use it), so after like 8 years i started to work as an autocad drawer for CSBE, some non-profit company, and then i bought one, which turned out like crap, but i am fine with it cause i bought it ;)

and why am i doing digital? cause i want to prove to myself and the rest, that i can do it, and i am good at it, but with the presence of you guys, it will be a hard and long way ;) but i hope that i'll make it :D

cheers!

[sweeneymini]

I started digitally with Deluxe Paint on the mighty Amiga. Then my raster drawing has idled along with using Paint Shop Pro 7.

I'm really starting to get into The GIMP now though and whilst going to the newsagents for my copy of Computer Music magazine, I ended coming out with this as well:- http://www2.ambientdesign.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=403

This led me to get a graphics tablet for The GIMP. I was looking at a Graphire4 or Volito2. I decided to go for the Graphire4, but I like the looks of Art Rage, which came with the Volito2 and so tried it...and it is so much fun to use, just like real doodling and painting 8)

[cym]

Digital art fascinated me from the time I got my first computer with Windows 3.1, it was a Tandy. I started doing pixel by pixel pictures in Paint. Later on with a newer computer I discoverd Paint Shop Pro and Blade Pro, with these programs I could indulge in jewel design and text design. I made many "banners" for websites, always with promises of payment that never came. So, I knew my art was never going to make me wealthy, but I enjoyed it. For a time I set it aside and played games on the computer. Then I was introduced to the LOTR Plaza, where I could show off my artworks in my own thread. So, I did. And then after downloading a trial version of Corel Draw, I wanted painterly tools, and went in search of free software. I found ArtRage version 1...its been true love ever since.

[heikki]

:)

Fine thoughts Sweenie.

Also using this digid-method art-makers dont need to be worry that oil-tube end or paper get wet.

:)

[Stephen Lo Piano]

Hello Sweedie,

I am also a person that started in artwork back in the 1960's.
I went through two years of occupational career training in high school for commercial art. Did a lot of sign painting, poster designing, and portrait or landscape paintings. Also completed a mail correspondence course for Advertising and Illustrating Art in the mid 70's (Art Instruction Schools, Minneapolis Minnesota) . After completing this course I attempted to free-lance unsuccessfully. Disillusioned I changed direction an pursued a college education majoring in accounting/business administration. My undergraduate studies were completed with many extra credits and courses in graphic arts and fine arts. I really never lost interest yet relized that reality for me would not allow me to pursue my earlier objective of becoming a free-lance artist. I did an enormous amount of volunteer work in college (1980's with all natural media no computers) working on the school newspaper, and art director of a school literary and fine arts magazine and organization. In the 1980's I began free lancing part time on my spare time and by 1988 had my mind in a state where I took risks and lost again at free-lancing. My very first experience with computers and design were in the late 1990's playing around in a computer lab at college with a Pascal program. I found it quite interesting creating shapes and primitive designs using algebraic formulas and program language yet really did nothing of substantial accomplishment. Due to a really bad experience in the late 1980's I never did anything in the 1990's and found myself working other types of employment. Back in 2004 I bought my first computer for my job and to edit some old photographs of my original artwork. I lucked out on buying the correct type of computer for digital art not knowing any of this type of digital art computer software existed since I was totally living in a different world throughout the 1990's. I lost my job a week after buying my computer and wound up with a lot of time on my hands. As a result I started looking around and from a lead on a radio computer talk show by Kim Komando I decided to try Art Rage 1.
Although I had my very first experience with graphic editing using; Borderbund Print Shop Deluxe and HP Image Zone Plus to complete my photo editing project with old art work, Art Rage is the very first program that I found to create Art Work in a digital way. Broderbund has nothing more than the Windows Metafile vector drawing program for artwork.
When I first tried Art Rage it was amazing to me. I followed Art Rage's suggestion to use a graphic tablet and this lead me to other Digital Art Work programs. For the past two years I have learned a lot about digital art work and regret the fact that I never knew this stuff existed in the 1990's.

I have to ask this question Sweedie since your past experience is rooted in natural media, from a different era in time when all you had was natural media. Now that computers allow you to create so much more in so much less time, do you feel short changed and wish you were only 15 to 20 years old when all this great digital art software became available? As you mentioned about the cleaning up of paints and mess, I also find with most medias correcting something you want to change is so much easier. Again with graphics programs that include lettering, years ago you had to layout your entire page with pencil and rulers, then estimate the centering of your lettering on a page, it would rarely be perfectly centered.
Using rub on graphics or lettering by hand you would rarely have the opportunity to go back and change something, unless you could paint over or move around with the use of overlay transparency sheets. With computers it is as simple as click and drag or hit that lettering/ format /center option.
I spent years back in the 1970's practicing lettering by hand, now it is an obsolete or amusing antique skill.
I find myself able to create artwork that was merely a vision and idea in my mind yet never could develop to such a point of perfection that is available with computer graphics and digital artwork today in the year 2006.

[amergin]

I've been an artist since I was a young teenager in the seventies. I became a software developer in the early eighties and developed some of the first paint software for the apple II using purpose built add-ons and the apple graphics tablet. Continued developing more and more graphic stuff through the eighties until I finally saw that there must be more to life than computers and ran away for a decade to plant trees and raise my kids. Now I've been back for a few years and just found artrage - at last - this is what me and all my clients were looking for all those years ago. Keep up the good work but don't bloat it - it seems to work great as it is - just speed it up more and more and more and more...!

[NewCube]

I used to draw as a kid (pencils and radiograph pens) up to the point of 16 when the college near me didn't have a Tech Drawing course, so I chose to do Computer Science in it's place. I'd had a C64 and Atari ST and was a hobbyist coder, so it seemed like a good switch.

My drawing had trailed off over the years at work, coding on-line insurance applications and the like. But a couple of months ago, I decided I'd "get back in to it". Looking on Amazon, I found the Volito2 for £29 so I though, "what the hell, that's like a round of beers up here in London..", so I bought it!

My next step was to find a package to rediscover the pleasure of drawing. I tried Photoshop, but I could see a steep learning curve ahead - I'm extremely computer literate, I've been working with them for 29 years from the age of 8 and now I build apps on them for a living, but I know almost nothing about Multiply Layers, Masking, erm and a whole load of other terms I saw in examples and tutorials on the web!

"Oh well", I thought, "looks like the nib on my stylus is safe for now". Whilst looking at yet more forums on the pros and cons of promoting a layer Mask to an Alpha channel multiply burn dodger whatever, I found a heated discussion about two products I'd never heard of: Sketch Book Pro and ArtRage. The gist of the thread was "ease of use and natural media".. Right then, this could be more like it!

OK, lets see: SBP $199, AR $20. They're kidding right? I must say, crazy as it sounds the low price and the 'kooky' name almost put me off (but then I heard about "Project Dog Waffle" and thought ArtRage wasn't so strange after all!). "OK, I'm going to have a got at the free trials and see what I can see."

However, just before I down loaded anything, I saw the Volito2 disk sticking out of the pile of papers on my desk. Emblazoned on the front "ArtRage WACOM Edition"! I couldn't believe it!!

I never did download the Sketch Book Pro trial...

[Aged P]

I also got into ArtRage by a happy accident.

I've always drawn and doodled, to the annoyance of employers and the detriment of my career!
(Small moment of glory as the only person who mastered Gemdraw, remember that anyone?)

50% of my School examination successes were in Art, the other one was English.

I've gone through the range from genuine Silverpoint via real Tempera to Oils and Acrylics.
Sold a fair few paintings, portraits, pets, Monet, La Tour and Van Eyck tribute paintings. Icons.
Never, ever did a decent landscape!

Now we live in a smaller house there simply isn't room for painting and us.
The garage is filled up with all the old stuff and the Bob Ross kit, but it's just too cold/hot/dusty/damp to paint out there!

I had nagged Tony, another member and old work mate, to get a Graphics Pad. Eventually his family bought him one.

A Wacom Volito2 complete with ArtRage. He sent me a pic, I downloaded ArtRage.
(Pondered, that in France this would mean Art Rabies!)

Bought cheap Graphics Pad, wouldn't work, sent it to a deserving group of struggling programmers in a far country.

Bought Volito2, wore it out in 3 months using ArtRage2 during Beta testing..

Bought Intuos3 A6, it came with a coffee mat with Painter Essential 2 inside it, there seems no point in opening it.

I have despaired of Juggernauts like Corel and Photoshop, I am gnashing my teeth before the Patent numbers have cycled through!

I am now attending ArtRage Anonymous. But they hold out little hope of a cure for this addiction!

ArtRage is simply the best painting program in the world.

[Sweedie]

Hi,
all of you fella ArtRagers! These are all so interesting stories, like dramas of the life in the age of Cyberia. I really enjoy you telling all this. I think it also makes Art, your Art, more interesting. Art is making visions of ones thoughts, minds and fantasies visible fore anyone willing to look. Every picture tells a story - even digital pictures do. So keep 'em coming - your stories and your visions. I love them :)

[AndyRage]

It's really very inspiring reading this thread. Thanks for sharing, everyone!

For myself... I'm a computer-graphics addict. When I'm writing computer programs it gives me a wonderful sense of creativity. Seeing my thoughts transposed through the program code into beautiful and visually stimulating works satisfies me immensely.
When I was 18 (ummm... 22 years ago?), working as a trainee communications technician for the Electricity Department in New Zealand, I bought a BBC Micro (32 KB RAM! 320 x 200 4-colour graphics!, 400K diskette drive!). It wasn't great graphically, but it had a very easy programming interface. With it I wrote my first commercial painting application in 1986. It sold two copies!
Bouyed by that phenomenal success, I went on through a number of jobs and companies (Defense Dept, IBM, Compaq) having nothing to do with commercial software development. But I still kept up programming as a hobby.
At that time, I had a passion for triangles. Triangles are important, because they're the building-block to 3D computer graphics. So I spent years of my life writing software to draw triangles very very VERY fast. I'd spend hours poring over a few hundred lines of computer code trying to squeeze "Just one more clock cycle" out of the code. (To explain - a computer 'clock' is what determines the speed of software. A 1 Gigahertz computer has 1 billion clock-cycles every second. For the computer to execute one instruction (eg: Get a number from memory, or Add two memory locations together) it takes a few clock cycles. When you're drawing graphics, you loop through the same group of instructions many thousands of times. So being able to reduce the number of clock cycles it takes to do a small graphics operation can save many many thousands of clock cycles over a larger graphics operation).
When I could produce very fast triangles, I could string them together to make faces on a polygonal mesh (a 3D object). At that point Matt and I began collaborating on software.
The triangles eventually went from single-colour (which gave me flat-shaded 3D objects) to gradient-coloured (which gave me 'Gourad shaded' objects) to textured phong-shaded, bump-mapped, shiny real-looking 3D objects. We had written our first 3D Painting application (4D Paint or Deep Paint). At the time we were the ONLY people doing real-time painting of bump, colour, shininess and illumination in real-time on a PC. This was back in the days when a 100MHz Pentium was absolutely cutting edge.
It got us fame, but little fortune. So we went and worked for MetaCreations, writing Kais Power Tools (KPT 5, 6, and 'effects') for them in collaboration with some other programmers. When MetaCreations vanished in a puff of eCommerce, Matt and I formed our own company doing contract programming for various people.
All the while we kept developing our painting technology, with CK - one of th programmers we'd worked with on 4D Paint. 4D Paint showed us that when you apply colour with the depth of paint, it can look very real.
ArtRage emerged from a demonstration of our new painting technology we wanted to show to other graphics companies in the hope they'd give us work! And not one of them was interested in the technology. We felt it was really quite cool, and that artists should have cool stuff to work with, so we wrapped it in a simple easy-to-use UI and gave it away for free. Oddly, as a free product, it made us more money than much of the paid work we'd done! It won a major software award and was picked up by Wacom for the Volito 2 graphics tablet.
We had over half a million downloads of ArtRage 1. Seeing the work artists were producing with it just floored me.
So we bit the bullet, lived off our mortgage for a year, and wrote ArtRage 2. We had to charge for v2 because we're really quite fond of working on our own graphics product, and would like to develop some other technologies we have ideas on - you know, other world-changing things ;) - and we ran out of mortgage to live on.
Digital Painting, because Computer Graphics. And Computer Graphics, because I can't live without it. I live and breath computer graphics.

[hype]

guess i'll throw my 2 cents in, as well.

the most amazing thing about this thread, to me, is the diversity of everyone's background.
yet here we all are, using and loving the same program for the same purpose.

i've loved drawing since i was a little kid. my favorite was with markers, because i liked how bold and solid the colors were, and that you could be very precise.
i should mention here that i loved Star Wars when it came out. it plays a big influence (besides being what i spent countless hours drawing!)
in high school, i got much more involved in technical drawing, and almost wanted to be an architect for a while. also did alot of screen printing on hand-cut emulsions in high school, and loved that (looking back, this was my first experience in thinking about "layers").
went to college initially for graphic arts, but quit after a year. i loved all the creative stuff, but didn't like the academic end of it that much. my parents sure didn't like that. college was the first place i used a computer to do anything art related. growing up, i had a commodore 64 which i loved, but which eventually turned into a game system because i didn't want to learn programming.
after college didn't work out, i focused on music for a few years. but, for a band to work, all members must have the same drive and determination. one of my band mates did not, and when he left, i was going to go to a 2 year school to learn to be a recording engineer. while on hold with the school arranging a tour, the recording mentioned Industrial Light & Magic. i asked what they had to do with ILM (they did the special effects for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and tons more), and they said they had a special effects course. so i signed up for that instead - it sounded like more fun. went for 2 years, graduated, moved to sunny (smoggy) Los Angeles, started working in B-movies, commercials, and tv, doing miniature models, costumes, and fx make-up (zombies, aliens, etc.). i drew all through school, and always for fun or when i thought of interesting designs for things. i have tons of sketchbooks filled with drawings. i learned proper marker rendering while in school, as well (and alot of industrial design).
in this college was my first exposure to Photoshop, autoCAD, and 3dsMax. left autocad behind, but still couldn't live without photoshop & Max to this day. i learned paint shop pro back then, too, before photoshop, and couldn't afford a tablet, so i bought this Crayola mouse that was shaped like a pen, but had a bulky little tip with a rollerball in it. it was only a tad better than the mouse.
i went to school for effects in '97, a couple years after Jurassic Park had been in theaters in '93. while in school i learned every kind of effects, and i was amazed that i could slave away all day in a machine shop, be filthy and covered in oil and sawdust and fiberglass resin and almost lose limbs on the power tools, or i could sit calmly and cleanly at a computer, and both tasks (if i learned enough and worked hard!) would result in the same thing - something that doesn't exist appearing on screen. obviously, i much preferred the clean, chemical-free route.
but computer graphics is a small, tight industry (growing rapidly, though) that, 9 years ago, was really hard to get into. so i did creatures effects and costumes and props. i still played around with photoshop and 3dsMax, and dabbled with a million other programs, including Painter - which was astouding but cluttered. also learned After Effects. this eventually led to my first job in doing digital effects for movies. over the past 4-5 years, i had started using photoshop for almost everything (especially once i got a Wacom). i still draw alot, but i scan things and color them digitally. and because i knew photoshop already, i've always been looking for ways to make it look like Painter, because i don't like having to learn all this other stuff all over again. ArtRage allows me (and all of us!) to not have to learn anything to start painting!
Last year, i decided to try to paint real oil on real canvases for the first time. i did about 5 or 6 paintings last year. it's kinda hard, things mix in unexpected ways, and it's really messy. but wow, was it fun! ArtRage is glorius because you get the same results without the mess!
anyway, that's my story. transitioned from physical effects to digital effects on the last Austin Powers movie, and haven't looked back since.

anyway, this is written kinda garbled because i went back and edited as i wrote...
i better stop now. :)

digital art rules!!! (although i've gained alot of weight since working solely on a computer!)

[justG]

I had a pretty strict, conservative upbringing. Though my Mum encouraged my interest in the arts (I use the generic term because my interest was generic, encompassing dance, music [listening to, playing, singing], acting [stage], sketching and drawing), it was assumed that I would naturally grow out of it and make a proper career choice. "Proper" meant physician or engineer, that's about it. I doodled and sketched as a child, but stopped when I was about 12. I seem to be a genetic dabbler, able to reproduce what I see quite faithfully with practise, but unable to produce what I imagine. Thus, I dabbled in the arts for years.

In 1993, as a freshman in uni (pre-med, natch), I discovered POV-Ray. Oh me, oh my. Thus ended my academic success and began my obsession with (dabbling in) computer graphics. Thirteen years later, I'm still a dabbler. I guess the left side of my brain (http://www2.ambientdesign.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1580#1580) still thinks the right side isn't practical enough, or I would've dedicated more of myself to what I love and gotten better by now. Consequently, I never felt justified in sacrificing other stuff in my life to invest in tools to nurture the creative in me (let's ignore for the moment that I have no excuse anymore, given the brilliance of generous open source developers).

But, no matter. As I grow older, I become more cognisant of the fact that it was a mistake to starve that side of me, and I've determined to at least try and learn what I can and actually put it into practise, no matter how much the members of online art communities sometimes make me feel that even mediocrity is unattainable.

<sap>The fact is that creative expression makes my heart smile.</sap> There are few tools that enable that expression without taxing my brain, my wallet, or my time; among these, ArtRage is the best.

- Gita

[Stephen Lo Piano]

AndyRage you wrote;
So we went and worked for MetaCreations, writing Kais Power Tools (KPT 5, 6, and 'effects')

Just thought I would mention, I have the KPT Collection by Corel, honestly use it a lot, it's an excellent plug-in type program. I understand that many of the effects included here were created by Kais Power Tools.

[AndyRage]

I'll see if I can remember the exact KPT filters Matt and I wrote entirely.

Oh, wait, I dont need to - they're listed on our products page!
http://www.ambientdesign.com/kpt.html
All the filters listed there were Matt and I entirely.

In KPT 'Effects' it would also be fair to say we turned the others into products - writing final-renderers and fixing the technology. KPT 'effects' was finished and polished entirely by Matt and I.

[Stephen Lo Piano]

All I can say is you guys have created some great program works, you're making my computer worth while.
Love the Hyper Tiling filter special effects, one of my favorites.
Another one I find myself using a lot is the Fiber Optics.
Note the avator to the left here with my portrait digitally painted, the background is from a KPT Collection filter entitled "Frax Plorer". I use this special effects filter quite often for backgrounds with portrait paintings.

One thing I noticed visiting your site here on Kai's Power Tools. The information there reads a Photoshop plug-in. I use the KPT Collection with everything except Photoshop (cannot afford a $600+ program with my current circumstances). I have KPT plugged into (actually the total cost of all these metioned programs was less than a copy of Photoshop CS); U-Lead Photo Impact 5, Painter, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw Graphics Suite 12 (both Photo Paint and Draw) and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 (a stripped down basic version of Photoshop). The KPT Collection plug-in program works great with all of these programs. Why not advertise the other programs this plug-in is compatible with, one might get the impression that you need Photoshop CS for these special effects plug-ins? You could be loosing the interest of potential buyers of this product if they have any other program that is compatible with the special effects plug-ins and are lead to believe that you need Photoshop CS to run the plug-ins.

[milan2005]

this could cause my traditional paiting skill disposing....

so i don't do digital painting very often....

i got more passion when i see a real canvas

[Erika_PLJ]

Art -

I've been interested in art my whole life. The problem is that I'm a great writer also. So I tend to have 2 muses who battle for that creative section of my mind that I contact when I'm not fried from work.

In college I studied English and finally had time my senior year to take Art classes. Never taken art classes before, even though I filled reams of artpads and doodled and drew far more than I ever wrote stories in my spare time (something that changed once I got a computer and realized typing could get my words out faster than writing freehand) - however, when I took my art classes my natural talent flourished and alas I couldn't take more classes because I had to graduate. I couldn't afford to stay on to get a double major.

I graduated prior to the big computer revolution and the internet and missed the graphical design boat.

I spent many years struggling w/ painting, producing only 1 painting every year or so that I deemed worthy of being put up on the wall. (My artist muse is HYPER critical.) I gave it up and worked on writing for several years.

Then this year I finally got myself a real computer this past fall. I could feel my artist muse whining at me to feed it again. I didn't have anywhere to pull out my art materials - no studio space and then I discovered Artrage. Drawing w/ a mouse was cumbersome, but rather like writing on a computer I took to the medium like fire to a dry forest.

I love that if you hate something you can back button a few steps and VOILA! your error has been corrected! Something's out of proportion ? Erase 1/2 of the drawing and start over again all you've wasted is time - not materials.

No mess, no fuss, my muse is happy! I also discovered a subject that I just LOVE drawing which is goofy dog and cat portraits. I threw away my high-brow dreams of ever becoming a highly realistic painter and embraced my cartoonish, somewhat impressionistic style and am HAPPY!

I begged and got a tablet for Christmas, I have Corel Painter IX and Photoshop - I live to create, draw, decoupage collages (photo manip wallpapers) - this former craft monger who used to cover the entire house w/ art supplies now contains her mess to the insides of her computer.

I hope to take some of my digital paintings and get them printed on canvas so my silly critters can grace the walls of my house and make me smile everyday. And who knows - maybe if my confidence gets high enough, I'll make copies and try to sell them to spread smiles to the faces of other dog and cat lovers from around the world!

[jagorny]

I have to say I have tried dozens of art programs and have never hopped onto the digital art kick until now.

For vector work, I will sketch, scan and trace from lineart and use CorelDraw to color and manipulate.

For photos, I have used Adobe and Corel products for many years (even from the years when Corel was highly unstable)

I bought my first tablet when I wanted better control over my photography editing tools. That was before I started shooting digital photos.

Of course I tried Corel's various artistic offering and various editions of Kai and Alien Skin tools with Photoshop, but nothing has really turned me away from the real thing.

A big portion of this is how I work - I have always been frustrated by the lack of dynamic control of the tablet - I like more freedom when dealing with my work and there are several areas that ArtRage covers and they are why I am now making serious headway into the world of digital painting and detailing proofs.

1) Attack angle for utensils. I could think of other places where this could be improved but the approach is realistic and predictable.

2) Simple zoom and rotation tools. I rotate my work a lot - just part of my workflow and getting the strokes and falir I want. Artrage is the first program I have used with quick and effortless rotational control. I used to literally have to crawl around the tablet to get to the right angle to do what I want. Now I turn the medium like I would normally do on a desk.

3) The INCREDIBLE masking system. The stencil system - in combination with a vector program - is going to basically allow me to do all of the complex airbrush masking that I used to do in reality, and later did with photoshop, but with a great deal of hassle. Again, it amazes me that all of the tools here act the way I would expect them to if I had a real Aerograph in my hand.

Anyways... I am excited to see what is possible now in digital art creation and I think more and more artists will use it in the future to map out their ideas and create virtual sketchbooks - wonderful!

[Sweedie]

1) Attack angle for utensils. I could think of other places where this could be improved but the approach is realistic and predictable.

2) Simple zoom and rotation tools. I rotate my work a lot - just part of my workflow and getting the strokes and falir I want. Artrage is the first program I have used with quick and effortless rotational control. I used to literally have to crawl around the tablet to get to the right angle to do what I want. Now I turn the medium like I would normally do on a desk.

3) The INCREDIBLE masking system. The stencil system - in combination with a vector program - is going to basically allow me to do all of the complex airbrush masking that I used to do in reality, and later did with photoshop, but with a great deal of hassle. Again, it amazes me that all of the tools here act the way I would expect them to if I had a real Aerograph in my hand.


I have to agree. I love AR because of this too...