A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream (Part 5) - Monsters from the Id

A continuation from A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream (Part 4)

So after realizing that Adobe products were going to be out of my reach (without the dream possibility of upgrading toward a full suite in inexpensive increments), I decided to look around further, and this was actually very informative. It got me to consider my next trial download which was Corel Painter 11 which is great fun with the Wacom tablet!

With Corel Draw you can get very expressive, because there are a huge number of pen and brush styles that combine fantastically with the pressure sensitivity of the tablet. Whereas Illustrator seemed more exacting and strict, Corel Draw was great for free-form expression. Without trying to recreate any of my sketches just yet, I just doodled around with the settings of the charcoal and pens to create this bit of weirdness:

This, I admit, took me on a bit of tangent, exploring how sculptural I could get with the sensitivity and shading. And continuing with my doodles, created this bit of alien-esque fantasy. (Having no anatomical guidance or backdrop for the first, I realize it's a bit off, so I took the first into Photoshop and just played with a bit of mirroring on the latter two)... 

I really hope to explore this program more in future, but my end goal was to create a total of 37 illustrations, and quickly. I didn't see how I could do that with this program... And, honestly, I just didn't have a big budget, so when someone finally suggested freeware - I skeptically decided I might as well take the time to investigate the options... and that was when I found a good link that lists these: 15 freeware graphic programs.

I decided to download InkScape, which seemed more inline with my vector needs, to create simply-designed, repeatable graphic characters that I could tweak from one image to the next.

I'll continue that story in Part 6.