Tuesday, December 11, 2007

For your wish list...

Christmas gift-giving has begun around the Welty house - at least for the adults who buy their own presents. :-) A couple of weeks ago I read about converting a Nintendo DS (one of those annoying portable game systems that teenagers are constantly hanging over) to a digital sketchbook. I read about it on Charley Parker's Lines and Colors blog in this post. So hubby and I decided to get one for each other for Christmas.

It arrived yesterday and I can you tell already, I love it! You know that 50 starts project for 2008? Well, you better believe that several of those are going to be done digitally. I can play with color, learn about values and color interactions, learn to handle something looser than a pencil - and all this in something that fits in my pocket. No mess, no spills, no bulky storage, no canvases to buy, no paint to waste, just all fun. (Another benefit - no photographing to get it in a blog post, just copy a file and there you have it.)

Of course, if you wanted "finished works" for printing and the like you'd have to invest in one those digital drawing tablets (beginning around $1K), but for a play-around, this is excellent.

Above you see a few images that I did on my DS today from WetCanvas references. Thanks to paul444 and kdkbrown for the photos. To see what can be done with this little setup, check the Colors! gallery - you will be amazed at what people can do with something that is no larger than your hand! Oh, and if you have java installed on your machine, be sure to watch the playback on some of the images in the gallery - very interesting. And yes, you can watch your own playbacks right on the DS!

2 comments:

Belinda Lindhardt said...

Wow Rose that is coool ! I have been eyeing off the graphics tablets for ages on ebay .. this might be a good alternative :)

Linda Blondheim said...

Rose,
That pepper is yummy.
Love,Linda
www.lindablondheimartnotes.blogspot.com