After visiting this blog about once a year for a decade or so, I've started thinking about drawing again. Well, I've thought about it a lot, just haven't done it. But a few good apps on my smart phone may change that. I did not draw these grapes. They are from a website called EasyDrawingTips. I wanted to practice using the blending brush on Corel's Painter Mobile. I haven't started on the leaves yet.
This is a screen grab from my Journi account.
I have been using Samsung Note phones for years without having bothered to check out the menu that pops up when you take out the pen. Then I decided to learn to use the translate option because I got a DuoLingo subscription for my birthday and thought it would be fun to make a little sketch of various new words I am learning. I had no idea that the Samsung Notes program was so robust. I can't find a fill option, but one remarkable feature that it does have is called "Neat Shapes." You draw a shape and the app evens it out. Perfect for making all these grapes perfectly round in the first draft.
After using Painter to fix up this onion, I inserted it into Samsung Notes to add the horizontal and vertical lines. Fun. Another drawing app I like is called Polish, which has some really interesting drawing tools such as dotted lines, hearts, and crushed rock. I bought a Lifetime Upgrade for $8 to make collages, after deciding to cancel my PicsArt account, which is up to $55/year now. Polish has some very nice features and although it is not as slick as Painter, it does a whole lot more than collages and text overlay.
The $$ I'm saving by not renewing PicsArt have gone to a subscription to a remarkable photo album called Journi. Pinterest is a good photo database especially since it added Sections, but it has a few limitations that make it impossible for me to use it exclusively:
1) Pinterest do not like long descriptions. It repeatedly tells me to cut it short! I don't want just a photo album, I want a photo journal. Pinterest also wants to be a social network, which does not interest me in the least. It is quite intrusive that way.
2) It is also cumbersome to get more than one photo per pin.
3) An account is limited to 200,000 pins.
My Journi upgrade gives me a whole T of storage, and instead of nagging me to keep the word count down, Journi's reminders reassure me that I will not run out of space. Write more! So I am much more inspired to make sketches on a daily basis if I have a place to store them alongside a story about each sketch.
