Nothing much to say lately, other than I've finally got a little free time for the moment.

For the last two days I've been messing around in GIMP, and switched around to using the paintbrush to sketch with instead of the ink pen...well, the one GIMP has anyway(I think the ink pen is a vector tool in Photoshop). Surprisingly the paintbrush is starting to look kind of good. It's weird...back when I first started to go 'all digital' in 2007, I avoided using GIMP for lineart because I didn't think the paintbrush OR pencil tool were good enough for drawing with....I instead used Painter Elements 2, and then imported the TIF over to GIMP for coloring...an annoying and tedious process, creating multiple files that I didn't really need.

Then, when I discovered a tool I never used in GIMP before(said Ink Pen), I realized that it was actually better than what I was doing with PE2, so I switched around 2008 and have been using it ever since.

Now I'm looking at what I can do with the paintbrush again, and I'm actually starting to like it a little.


Here's the main difference that I can see: the Paintbrush has a fixed size depending on the brush that you select(you can resize it a little with options, but you more or less select a different brush in order to have a larger or smaller size). There IS a little option on the paintbrush tool itself to use tablet-pen pressure or velocity(or both) to determine size as well, and with that on, it's been a little more interesting. The paintbrush makes softer lines, and I can easily alter opacity with little or heavy pressure depending on what I need.

The ink pen, on the other hand, has much different options than any other drawing tool, and generally makes clean, albeit solid lines. You can still change opacity and size by varying your pressure and setting ONE option for size, but in some ways it is a little limited on the fly. The options expand it much farther than I probably realize(because I rarely mess with settings much), but while drawing, you seem limited to what those exact settings are.


For right now, I'm sure I'll stick with the ink pen for finishing(right now I'm just sketching with the paintbrush, but the results are pretty solid), but I'm starting to think that, with a little practice, I wonder if the paintbrush would some day become my line-arting tool of choice(and bring me around full circle, I guess).


I'd ask what my watchers use, but....most of you either have/prefer Photoshop, or don't have a tablet, or don't use GIMP too often really. Well, I'm just curious in general what people use digitally, I guess. I'm sure vector will always be the top tier when it comes to clean linearts, but I'll probably have to wait for Inkscape's update(whenever they actually finish that update) to be able to get anywhere with it.


*sigh* And my Text Tool is still bugged in GIMP 2.6.0, whereas it's fine in 2.6.7...the version I ---hate---. I guess I don't use text too often anyway, but it's such an annoyance. I wish they wouldn't save settings like that across versions. It can be helpful, but not at this point. Maybe if I could figure out where the settings were being saved, I could restore them somehow, but no luck yet. Ah well.