Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Monday, March 02, 2009

Pixel Pushing: Painting

I've been looking for natural painting software and have been using a Corel Painter X trial (but Painter 11 just came out, so I'm giving that a spin now). The software is impressive in its breadth and depth but I haven't been happy with it.

First, it's not a piece of software that you can just pick up and use, and that doesn't feel very 'natural' to me. If I want to draw with a pencil, I just pick it up and draw. You're provided with a huge number of choices of medium and fine control over how they work but the menus are dense and I wasn't able to hit the ground running. A big snag was pressure sensitivity. Painter seems to recognize two levels of pressure from my Wacom tablet: soft and HARD. I've tried adjusting the tablet settings and the software settings but I just can't get the thing to give me a decent read on my drawing pressure (my styles depend on a good read of my pen pressure, which I get from the Adobe software).

Needless to say, I'm not ready to shell out $400 for software that won't allow me to easily do what I want: colour comics. I don't mind complexity, but I mucked around for ages with some of the tools and never got them working the way I wanted.

Well, today Kemie (an istock acquaintance) posted some sample art using some simple paint software called ArtRage. It costs $25. And, at first glance, it gave me what I wanted on the cheap.

First, it recognized all of the levels of pressure sensitivity from the tablet which meant that I could draw the way I wanted -- naturally -- right from the start. Second, even thought it provides a much narrower range of tools with fewer options for control, I was able to select the pencil tool and with a few nudges, get pencil lines that looked and felt like a real pencil.

But the best thing about ArtRage is the interface. It gives you the entire screen for drawing with basic flyout menus that are easy to get rid of. Fullscreen workspace is the default makes you realize that menu and flyout clutter is a huge weakness on Painter and the Adobe software.

I'm not giving up on Painter ... but I'm too poor to invest in something that's way too deep for my purposes. And I need to figure out the tablet issues: Painter certainly has some advice to give on how to be insensitive.

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