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Open Figure Drawing Studio – Wilmington DE

I have to say that I am beyond thrilled to report that the Delaware Art Museum is having Open Figure Drawing Studio time every 1st and 3rd Monday evenings of each month. Find more information on their website (scroll down – it’s under the ‘drawing and painting’ subsection.

I’ve only been to two sessions, but I’m really looking forward to number 3, and I feel like I can see a marked improvement just since the first session. It’s long past time I got back to the basics. I have a feeling this will greatly improve my work overall.

If you’re in the area, and like to draw figurative work, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Aviary

So the combination of images above (sorry about the crappy camera phone ‘scans’) was assembled in Aviary in my Chrome browser session. I’m always interested in checking out new technologies – especially when it comes to digital art, and that’s what Aviary provides: free, comprehensive creative tools – all right in your browser. There’s an app for it in the Chrome App Store, and  I have to say that it works pretty well. There’s some bugs to be worked out, and this is clearly a ‘young’ product, but the potential of this thing is amazing.

I use Google Docs pretty much exclusively for my personal document editing, and the idea that there will soon be a creative suite to match it is just awesome! You can bet I’ll be watching this one closely.

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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