Distraction

Recently there has been quite a lul in the more immediately tangible aspects of my career. That is, I havn't been painting much at all. I chalk it up to crappy weather which has a bad tendency to influence my mood, and the fact that I have been attempting to experiment with the Gimp.

This lovely program is a freeware version of Photoshop. I personally don't find it performs quite to par since it works with RGB and lacks CYMK (there are ways of tweaking this, and I have attempted a plug-in called Separate, but have yet to use it properly. Call me lazy but Photoshop is easier when it comes to this, being built-in and all), and the fact that there is no easy "Flow" option for the paintbrush tool.

Did I mention my computer runs on Linux? Well, it, it does. :) There are ways of getting Windows and Mac based programs onto Linux (a product called Wine is handy), but I've tried iTunes on it and it is very slow and laggy. I don't believe my comp. is strong enough to use Photoshop through it as a result.

What I come accross in the past couple days though is a book called Grokking the Gimp. Written by a crazy smart and well-rounded guy named Carey Bunks (he's into Vaudville arts apparently), it is quite detailed and extremely helpful. It is also Open Publication. Find the index here to puruse at your own liesure. I have only gotten to chapter 3 but it has already put new faith back in me as to its abilities. Perhaps I won't get as frustrated once I have a better understanding of how the program works as opposed to simply not being able to find an equivalent to a Photoshop action.

So that's why I've been absent and have no current images up on here at the moment. We'll see how things go. With experiments sitting in .XCF format progress can only be guaged by the bar on the right of this site. :)