Computer Fun
Most software designed for drawing is made for boring work-style drawings: filled and unfilled circles and rectangles, lines, arrows. And some fanciful variations and combinations thereof. While some of those applications are incredibly useful and part of my daily toolkit (namely Microsoft Visio), none seems tailored to the artist in us.
Well. Some are, and some are so good fun that they deserve a mention here. My favorite artistic painting program must be Ambient Design’s ArtRage 2. Its dead cheap (starter edition for free, and only $25 for the full thing. Gimme break!), and is sooooo much fun playing with. I have honestly never thought it possible that creating visual art on the computer can be so much fun. If you ever wanted to have fun with the computer in a creative visual kind of a way, try ArtRage2.
Take a photo you like. Fire up ArtRage, set the photo as the tracing image, and create a painting. I made a sketch for a real oil paining in that way, and like it so much that all our computers now use the sketch as a desktop background wall paper.
You can download the wallpaper in several typical screen resolutions here. I am now back over at the easel…