Once in a while I get the bug to tinker around in Blender, Inkscape, Gimp, or Krita. The bug usually doesn’t last long, but it’s fun while it lasts.
I ordered a cheapie graphics tablet today to tinker with (Gaomon M10K Pro). It is reportedly compatible with Linux through the Digimend driver. After applying some coupons for a 15% discount and some free extra nibs for the pen the total came to $61 shipped. It’s the type without a display, which many people seem to prefer, and it has tilt function. Just something that might be fun to tinker with once in a while that was inexpensive. And my girlfriend likes to paint sometimes, so maybe she will get some use out of it too.
As a kid I loved drawing, spending many lone hours with pencil and paper going at it, which eventually got replaced by skateboarding, then guitar. I still quick sketch out an idea here and there, but man I have really lost any skill that I had at it as a kid.
Sorry if this comes off sounding like a covert ad or something (it definitely isn’t!). Plenty of that going around these days for sure. I had been looking at some drawing tutelage things recently, and Toleolu’s thread on mobile games (just doing something for fun) kind of merged in my brain, which led to taking a look at the status of graphics tablets on Linux these days. Maybe it gives someone else an idea for something that might just be fun to do.
I messed around with Inkscape [literally made a mess] for awhile but found it too unintuitive for me, only meaning it’s not how I would have designed it. Isn’t that the issue with most technical design though? lol
I’ve been trying out DAWS for android and it’s the same issue. Mixpad would be ok if everything worked properly but I couldn’t get it to loop record and I want that function for trying out varying harmonies, riffs etc.
At this stage I’d settle for any no bells and whistles simple 4 track with loop record function.
I’ve tinkered with GIMP and Inkscape over the years, a little bit of Krita but never Blender beyond opening it up and not wanting to watch hours of tutorials to find out how to do something. I don’t have the art gene though so it’s just playing and getting utility stuff done.
I liked Gimp, used it a lot when I was running a Linux box. Never really did a lot with it but found it’s features comparable to Photoshop without the high cost and complexity.
I worked at a place when the girl who did the graphics used Photoshop, the stuff she could do with it was pretty amazing.
Blender actually isn’t that bad to learn the generals. The interface is unorthodox, but it is much more intuitive than it used to be before the major interface overhaul some years ago. I learned the basics through a tutorial series from the Blender site in the old interface, and then again with a video series many later for the new interface. I would say that it takes about a month of learning and daily use to feel ok getting around in the major parts of it. The hardest stuff in Blender is having the art skill in the first place to pull things off. I don’t have that, but I enjoyed tinkering with it anyway and modeled up a few things here and there, mostly via very basic modeling and animation skills picked up in the Blender tutorials. Blender is also definitely not an application that you can drop for some extended time and come back to as easily as Photoshop or Illustrator. It probably takes a couple of weeks to get back up to speed. Maybe considerably less if your notes were good when learning it the first time.
I never tinkered too much with Krita just because of not having a graphics tablet to do so. And those small Wacom Bamboo tablets at around $100 didn’t seem like a good time to me. But there are lots of better featured low cost options for graphics tablets these days. 8k pressure res, tilt function, batteryless, Linux compatible, @ ~$60, and software such as Krita available today. Seemed like a no brainer for some good fun.