[in progress] quiet time

It’s always a dilemma whether or not to put up an unfinished picture, because it does spoil the magic a little.

This was a scanned A4 picture but retraced and coloured in Paint Tool SAI.

Things I’m LOVING about SAI right now:
1. The colour mixer. So damn useful, and JUST the very thing I never knew I needed. The design may be a little counter-intuitive, but the multiple sliders allow you to go back and pick various degrees of blending and is excellent for sussing out highlights and shadows without relying on automated brush blending options (as in PS).
2. The variables you can adjust for the brushes, all in a concise little toolbox. Being able to tinker with the strength and persistence of colour-blending as well as standard variables like opacity, size and minimum brush size (for touch-sensitive tablets) is SO useful that I am NEVER looking back, PS!!! Also, what I found really annoying about OC is that quite a few brushes (esp oil and watercolour) would not colour at full opacity or would bleed/blend with other colours really unpredictably, but other brushes would not blend at all. SAI makes blending a separate option (3 separate options actually) which affords an amazing range of versatility all with the one tool.
3. The kit is incredibly well-adjusted for CG. The responsiveness and integration with tablet makes for a very pleasant experience. In a way it feels like it took what’s necessary from both OC and PS and made them better-adjusted. Another thing I really liked is that it saves the settings for a tool (e.g. brush or pen), unlike OC which resets the tool to default every time you switched between tools.
4. The ability to turn the canvas at various angles. At first I thought I’d never use this, but given how Wacom is rigidly oriented – and hence completely unintuitive to the way one usually draws – this function turned out to be an ingenious tool to get those awkwardly angled lines just right.

Not as impressive bits:
1. So far I haven’t found (not that I’ve really been looking lol) a quick way to accurately select large areas for filling. In that respect I still prefer PS’s pen tool, which neither OC nor SAI has. However, the quick mask function along with its very responsive touch makes selection quite quick as well.
2. I haven’t found a way to copy all layers in a selection.
3. It doesn’t have the brush range that OC does. On the other hand, the adjustments for the brush tool is much more intuitive than OC and there are a number of basic brush options (e.g. acrylic, crayon) from which you should be able to emulate the most common media. Haven’t found a good alternative to OC’s oil and watercolour…although those two brushes were so frustrating for me in OC I’m sort of glad not to go back to it.
4. Supposedly it has a fairly limited memory allocation (or whatever), so it won’t take large files. This is a surprising restriction, because it means really that at most SAI could only produce web resolution pictures. The current picture is about 1200×1600 and I hope I can finish it using SAI, but I’m fairly sure that doing anything for print would be out of question.