Esotropiart

Since I bought my Wacom graphics tablet, I have been considerably more interested in pressure sensitive applications. Every once in a while I happen upon a gem. Art Rage 2, by Ambient Design was one such discovery. I had been aware for quite a long time of the possibility of realistic natural art media simulation on the computer. I came across Fractal Design Painter several years ago, before it was bought out by Corel (now Corel Painter). I was astounded at the vast tool set and the concept of the then novel idea of brush variants (especially rotating/scaling nibs with movement).

I currently own Corel Painter Essentials, as it came with my Graphire 4 tablet. It is a fairly interesting program, but obviously it has a limited feature set compared to the full version. When I saw Art Rage 2, I was enthused, especially after seeing it in action on a very cool personal blog, Chad Essley's Tablet PC SketchBlog, where a talented blogger creates an original sketch every couple days. Oh, did I mention Art Rage is free?! By the way, all graphics programs should take a lesson from Ambient Design's ability to produce an ultra smooth interface. It is breathtaking to see how smooth everything is. You can rotate the canvas to any angle without changing the data (image pixels), and you can smoothly zoom in and out with incredible ease and immediate response. Very cool indeed! There is no other program that has this sort of functionality to my knowledge.

I don't have any profound technique or tutorial offerings at this point, but I did dabble with Art Rage 2.