Well for the moment, I seem to be settling into learning Painter. To me, it feels a lot like the traditional oil painting I used to do, (and still might do in the future).

It's really a strange thing working digitally...so many options and decisions to make, already, and I'm sure I've only my littlest toe dipped into the sea of possibilities. One thing that comes to mind is there are so many ways to 'cheat', at least as far as manual dexterity and hand eye coordination are concerned, so many ways, if you've a digital photo, to have the software do the drawing, the tracing, the painting the mark making the color selection...I think it used to be that at least there was a certain uniformity of mark or style that allowed one to recognize this as computer work, but these days the software is much more sophisticated, and after the process is through there are small tweaks and editing that can be done that make it look as if the entire image were done by a human as opposed to an algorithm.

So I somewhat have to wonder...what's the point? Why spend a few days creating an image that might be generated in an hour or two? Guess I'll have to experiment a bit to really compare the two processes, but coming from a traditional background, I'm at the moment choosing to go the 'hard' way first, do a free hand self-portrait. Then I'll take the same photo and see if I can generate close to the same resulting image in 1/10th the time, as I think. I'll say this, at least this digital painter is fun to me and seems comfortable and familiar so far.

For the moment as I do this I'll be posting most of my work as WIPs (works in progress) in my scraps section.