Fwd: coloring

[Bretsch Katie]

s, Yes, GC is an excellent low overhead application to do simple color fills on line art. Get Hagen Hanke's manual and study the colors and tools sections. Sounds like you can get at least most of what you want with careful color selection and the paint bucket tool. You may have to create custom color pallettes to make it easy, and may want a separate ap to do that. There are several small shareware aps that deal with custom color set creation. Adobe Illustrator is the premier application for the kind of work you are doing, although Photoshop has lots of the same tools. Believe it or not, I have found that the Appleworks Drawing program is absolutely excellent for this kind of work and will more than ably do 99% of what the average artist needs. Even so, I end up using GC 99% of the time, because it is easy and I know it well. I open one of the others only when I can't easily make GC do what I need (custom gradients or vector drawing, for instance). To me, the biggest challenge on this kind of stuff is getting a decent scan of freehand line art from a scanner mere mortals can afford. Vuescan (another shareware) has a "line art" setting which does a much better job than what is likely to have come with your scanner and probably makes you choose between "photo" and "document" settings, neither of which is right. My favored drawing medium is soft pencil. Getting a good B/W scan of soft pencil drawing is a terrible challenge. Go to URL below... http://homepage.mac.com/kbretsch/FileSharing13.html Go into "forRC" folder. Go to "gc_fill_sample.jpg" or "gc_fill_sample.pic" to download a sample of line art scanned with Vuescan and filled and file tuned using GC. Havent' had time to participate in the picture data auto fill discussion, but that's a great feature (in progress) of GC for this kind of work also. Side Note to Peanut Gallery: No crude German humor on the art. It is for a VERY SERIOUS, HIGHLY INTELLECTUAL project for the Burning Man Festival. =8o KB --------------------------------------- Katie Bretsch <http://homepage.mac.com/kbretsch/ART/> kbretsch@mac.com 503.234.2346