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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:
When you see a / between options for a key – hitting that key repeatedly rotates through those selections.
w = magic wand
t = text / text mask
i = eye dropper
p = fill rectangle / ellipse / polygon / lasso
a = pencil / pencil former
s = eraser / eraser former / magic eraser
d = paintbrush / paintbrush former
f = airbrush / airbrush former
g = fingertip / fingertip former / spread / blur / blur former
One last thing – if you’re also a fan of Open Canvas (or even if you don’t know if you are) – take a minute or 17 to check out their growing community of artists online.
Navigation can be a bit tricky as this portion of their site is only in Japanese. (Unless you’re using Google Chrome which will automatically ask if you’d like the page translated to English.)
Click on one of the images as they’re presented in the slideshow you see when you first get there. Click on it one more time in the page that loads. You’ll see the process just like in one of my videos right on their site.
Are you an artist that uses OC? Join the community and you can upload your event files for folks to see!
Edited to add: I just stumble on another great resource for folks looking to learn about Open Canvas. There’s a wikibook about Open Canvas you should check out if you’re looking for more information.
Thank you for this very, very helpful guide. I been using OpenCanvas for 2 years and I have no idea how to fully utilize it. Finally after searching (and searching and so on…) on google with the right words, I found your blog. I can’t thank you enough!!
Thank you for this very, very helpful guide. I been using OpenCanvas for 2 years and I have no idea how to fully utilize it. Finally after searching (and searching and so on…) on google with the right words, I found your blog. I can’t thank you enough!!