Well Ray, it's what I'd still HAVE to paint on 'cos I ain't got a Wacom! Actually, although I can draw - I can't paint, so luckily I won't be needing real canvas or a Wacom :-D

Nah, it was something Paul said 'bout OpenCanvas. To be honest I've never heard of OpenCanvas - but his mentioning it reminded me of something. A few months back I stumbled upon a program called Canvas 8 by Deneba. It was in WHSmiths on a coverdisc, and unusually for me, I bought it just out of curiosity of why it's normally such an expensive program.

Anyway, I installed it, saw the insane amount of buttons/options, and thought pffffffffft! I'll leave it till I have more time. Since then I've reformatted and forgotten all about it - till today (cheers Paul).

Good news is; it's Vector/Bitmap/Animation all-in-one (although I'm not sure 'exactly' what they're getting at regarding the animation side of things.

Incase you've never heard of it - here's their website:

http://www.acdamerica.com/products-x/default.html

...not bad when you can get it for free! (Well, Version8 you can).

Paul, I'm going to play with Canvas 8, get a feel for it - then I'll try-out OpenCanvas. As for Flash, I though that's just an animation format, so I doubt it would be much use to me.

Quest, big-time thanks for that. It's great to see it built-up like that - though I do have a question:

On the light coloured flesh spots you call gradient fills, what tool is it? I've been playing with Canvas 8, and I seem to have found a way of reproducing what you did with various tools. I can't seem to find something that gradient-fills to a 'freehand' shape though :-/ Does this tool have a special name in Vector terms? If I knew what it's called - I might find it among the options ;-)

As for Illustrator, I'm at a dead end. I visited Adobe, it won't let me register for some reason, and I can't even find out what the 'qualifying' products are for a discount(it won't work). I think I'll have to give this Canvas 8 a good thrashing in order to know if I should pay-out for Illustrator or not.

Len.

The wait can be horrific, but the outcome can be worse - pumeco 2006