Okay, I'll admit said I wasn't going to post anything till the current commission was done, but it's been three months since I last posted something, and I should let my new watchers know I'm still producing artwork, since some of them (most? I don't know) may not be checking my "Art Activity" journal. Lastly, this pic has comparatively little time invested in it.

Some background as I don't normally post PNG images--in fact I had to strip out some nasty-looking stray pixels in the transparent area and re-upload shortly after posting this. Some thumbnails may still contain the old version.

I watch in awestruck-ness at some of the stuff produced with Paint Tool SAI. I should try it myself. but for some reason I haven't. It's certainly not a matter of paying for it--I bought Autodesk Sketchbook much the same way as one would SAI (and for about the same price thanks to a NY Comic Con discount coupon). On both programs, the feature I'm most impressed with is its ability to rotate the entire image so you can draw curved lines across one's tablet instead of at an awkward angle. But Sketchbook doesn't seem to have any sharp-edged brushes, and I'm still no closer to purchasing SAI for some reason.

Enter the computer magazines I buy, one of them being PC Utilities, a UK magazine that comes with a DVD chock full of stuff. Among it's featured applications are a bunch (in other words, a metric buttload) of other freeware/ shareware apps that don't get much more mention than a short description. One of these I ran across was SmoothDraw. Intriqued by the name, I Googled around, found it's homepage and downloaded the freeware program (2MB and change--but you'll need Dot Net 2.0 (a 22MB download) if you don't already have it).

Well, what do you know--it does layers and whole-image rotation. The image above is the result of about 3 hours of dinking around with SmoothDraw, including some optimization under Photoshop Elements to make it an 8-bit PNG -- too many folks post outrageously bloated files under that format and I refuse to be one of them.

As for the pic itself, as the title says, it's an experiment in cute-turned-up-to-11 I sketched up in the wee hours of this morning before I installed SmoothDraw. I leave it to you to figure out what inspired the style, only adding that I may re-do it in Inkscape with colored linerart.

Scanned pencils inked in SmoothDraw 3, logo and optimizations added with Photoshop Elements 6.0. Project ID# 236

[222] Added to VCL 09/15/2019