August Green

I didn't start doing digital art with Photoshop. My first digital art program was Painter 7, which did some amazing things when it was not crashing and taking my hours of work with it. (It had a way of making your art totally disappear when you tried to save a large file.) I did this study of the trees out my window in August of 1999. Painter had all these art-like, almost-natural "brushes" that you could use, but its interface and tool controls were time-consuming and often confusing. I later upgraded to Painter 9, and found that although it was more stable, the tool controls were still hard to work with. I ended up using Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for my digital art, even though Photoshop is even less "spontaneous" than Painter. Now I wonder whether I should give Painter a chance again, with its newest incarnation number 11. It would involve a lot of attention to learn it, just as I pored through the manual learning Photoshop. Do I have the energy, and is it worth it? I'm not sure. I don't even use Painter 9 all that much. It is too "arty" for my taste, and doesn't support geometric abstractions. Or if it does, I haven't found the geometric toolbox there yet.