Art… Ever tried to do art with new tools? It’s tough to unlearn your old tricks and pick up the new ones…
Well, this is what I’m going though right now. See, not only has the machine I run photoshop on changed, but so has everything else. Photoshop CS is a *lot* more precise than Photoshop 7 in just about every function so a lot of the things I used to rely on to fuzz an edge or blend things don’t work that way anymore. All of the tools are … different … now too. For example, the airbrush is gone. It’s been replaced by the regular brush which has airbrush functions (about a dozen of them to play with)…
I’ve also got Zeze’s Wacom hooked up which is taking some getting used to again as I’ve been without one for over a year… No more nipple-mice! yay!
The screen on this laptop is also taking some getting used to as it’s color matched and brightness compensated so all of my shading is more true…
Then you have the Mac OSX operating system as well as the Mac itself, which are insanely fast and pretty much designed to run Photoshop at impressive speeds. There was absolutely no lag in my airbrush strokes… Very nice.
All of this conspired to let me do real shading at 100×100 pixels rather than faking a four color process and cell-shading. See the new Ri’Hahn icon for an example. He was sketched out on the Wacom, colored and shaded in about 15 minutes…
Well, Zeze is awake now so my peaceful “art zone” will shortly be invaded and we’ll be off and running.