d r a g o n b o n e s    

As anyone who has been following along with my art can tell you – I’m a big fan of Open Canvas. Sure – there are much heavier hitting applications when you want to do some hard core photo editing, manipulation, and even just good ol’ fashioned painting. Here’s the thing though – OC is lightweight, it works, and it stores every brush stroke in an event file that you can play back as an animation.

If you’ve seen one of my illustration videos, you’ve seen this aspect of the software in action. I use OC to create the animation, and then CamStudio to record that animation in a file that YouTube can use. (I touch it up and add credits / soundtrack in Windows Movie Maker.) Yeah – I guess you could say I’m a fan of inexpensive – or better – free software. I’m a believer in the philosophy of KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. When things get complicated it’s just too easy for them to break down.

The problem with the newest version of Open Canvas (4.5) is simple enough. They’re a Japanese company and they’re struggling to get the English help files in place. The software is set up / designed in such a way that even a clueless gaijin like myself can muddle their way through it, but the help files really would be nice to have. If only for the hot key combinations.

What’s that? You’re looking for the keyboard shortcuts / hotkeys for Open Canvas 4.5 too? It’s you’re lucky day. I just went through and dug out all that I could the old fashioned way – I tried them and watched what happened. I’m sure to have missed some and/or managed to screw up the definitions for what some of them do, so feel free to correct me in the comments. I’ll edit the post to make the corrections and that way we’re all on the same page.

I’ll put these behind a cut to save your RSS feeds from getting bloated:

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