Lance Ulanoff


  • Design Software: The Artist's Best Friend
  • Continued

The walls and door of my office are festooned with "artwork"—sketches and doodles, really—that I've produced over the course of weeks, months, even years. I'm a closet cartoonist and have been drawing for much of my life. Though much of the posted artwork was hand-drawn, a good third of it was produced on the PC. In fact, I've been drawing on computers for 20 years. Now, a bunch of out-of-touch university instructors are complaining that young people weaned on computer graphics will lack the basic skills needed to become good artists.

Boo-hoo. They say that the big bad computer will make it impossible for artists to learn the basics of volume, shading, and perspective. According to a Reuters article, computer artists move too quickly to create good art. Drawing on paper, the article says, "requires concentration, introspection, and revision." One professor characterized it this way: "Drawing to me is a sense of consciousness . . . a spiritual existence." Wha . . . ? I've met professors that think like this. They were the ones who came to class wearing sunglasses and then asked if we'd like to go out onto the campus lawn to talk about the "nature of love." Give me a break.

I enjoy drawing on paper and do it consciously and unconsciously all the time—it's something of a nervous habit. I derive equal enjoyment out drawing with a computer, and I can tell you from long experience that it demands just as much "concentration, introspection, and revision."

Back in 1986, I got my hands on a first-generation Apple Macintosh. It had few applications beside PageMaker 1.2 and the Cricket application suite, which included Cricket Draw. Fresh from my college experience, where I'd been drawing a weekly comic strip, the idea of drawing on a PC intrigued me, though I doubted it could be done. Yet, during downtimes at my first newspaper job, I used the blocky mouse and basic bitmap software (something less sophisticated than Microsoft Paint) to draw super-simple cartoons. One of my first was a guy jogging in the cold. It was black-and-white and not particularly nuanced, but not bad, either—in fact, the newspaper ran a couple of my early drawings in print. In time, I graduated to a better app, Aldus Freehand.

Freehand was something of a sea change for me. It switched the technology from bitmap to vector, and soon my drawings were taking on greater sophistication. Still, the output rarely looked very good, because the 300-dpi laser printers were all black-and-white and the color ink jets were pitifully low-res. In time, that changed, too.—Continue reading...