Published: Dec 15, 2011

So this was another iPad painting. As you can see, this is a substantial improvement over the old paintings I've done with that tool.

Why? New software: Inspire Pro. This particular started as a quick speed painting to see how well the new software worked. Sadly though this is why Twilight's color is so screwed up; that purple was one of the default "favorites" and I wasn't expecting this to actually matter. But by the time I realized that this was going somewhere, it would have been crazy impractical to retrofit the color.

Some thoughts on Inspire Pro. First, the way it handles paint simulation is, in the words of one of the greats, "totally awesome!" /)(^3)(\

The ability to dry brush, have it both auto reload the brush with paint on every stroke, and also not have it auto reload the paint is extremely helpful. I'm not going to lie when I tell you that of the probably thousands of strokes in this, there were probably only 1% that actually had paint on the brush when I started.

Moreover, the brushes themselves were useful, including a flat brush, a round brush, a fan brush, a clumped brush, and even a pretty realistic palette knife. You can control the size, rotation, and pressure of the strokes as well as how much paint you put on the brush.

Color selection is nice in that you can build up a palette of favorites quickly and easily. Just drag and drop and you're off to the races. Similarly, the program will let you handle thinning the paint by controlling the alpha value.

It does lack a few features however. First, and man was I a sad panda when I had to add a background to my speed-paint-gone-horribly-right, was the fact that it doesn't support layers or alpha. Basically the canvas is like a real canvas; primed with the color of your choosing.

The second is no move tool. Just as my lack of planning killed me on the background, so too did it when I realized Twilight was biased to the bottom of the canvas. With no way to shift everything up I was stuck going with how things had landed. I know that the "move" tool is crutch of digital painting, but if I'm going to go digital, I might as well get the benefits of it if I have to sacrifice things like being able to rotate the brush without opening menus.

The last is the absence of a lasso tool. Not that any of the programs I've used so far has it, but having worked in GIMP and Sai, I've been quite spoiled by being able to easily shift, pan, skew, rotate, etc. some part of my picture.

All in all though I love this tool. It's so much better than Brushes for digital painting. If you had to ask me, and I'd consider you a fool asking an amateur like me, but I'd say that the extra $3.50 was totally worth it.