learn to fly

I’ve been working on some sketches for a stock illustration company, and because I like to be difficult and do things backwards, I got it into my mind that I wanted to sketch on the computer before coloring the picture traditionally. Its much easier in terms of composition if I can just move objects around rather than erase or trace, but as anyone with a tablet knows, nothing comes close to the feel of an actual pencil and paper.

I’ve been trying out some shareware versions of two programs by one company, FlySketch and Acorn. I came across FlySketch when I started using Journler a lot and wanted to be able to sketch into my entries. The above picture is done using FlySketch, which I have to say is pretty much the closest thing I’ve come to a good sketching program on the computer. Its not intended to be a high end drawing application and so there’s a lot of things that might otherwise be annoying, like the paper size will only go so large and you can’t rotate the page. But, mostly I want something that I can print out and then trace onto paper with my lightbox so I’m not too concerned about high res options.

Acorn Sketch

Acorn makes up for what FlySketch may be lacking, including some pretty cool filters (like the image above, using the bloom filter which for reasons not entirely clear to me, I like) and its pretty fun to sketch in, but for some reason I like FlySketch better, I’m not really sure why! But really, I should just get into carrying my pad of tracing paper everywhere with me, because I think in the end it would be a hell of a lot simpler.