John wastes paper

NEAR MISS DEPT: It's so sad when an earnest effort falls short. That's the case with Krita's 2D animation feature. Krita  is a free, open-source painting and drawing application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. And as far as I can tell, it does a fantastic job with those toolsets . Version 3 has added some promising 2D animation tools, very similiar  to those in Sketchbook Pro 7. There is the same easy to use timeline and playback controls, multiple layering, and a robust set of brushes for drawing and painting frames. But after testing the Mac version for a week (running OSX 10.11.6) I have to give its animation tools a "Fail" because of frequent crashes and tool " lock-ups " when features such as frame advance would stop responding, forcing a restart. Tools, even free ones, need to function flawlessly so that they stay out of the way of the artist's thought process. The scratched out key drawings above were all that I could accomplish because

KICKING THE TIRES DEPT: I've been giving the free, open source painting and drawing software  Krita a test drive. It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac and has some really nice features, including an animation tool set that I'll post about in a few days after I've given it some more testing. In the meanwhile, here are a few doodles I drew using an impressive pencil-brush that's included with the program. It has a nice tilt feature that takes advantage of the angle of your stylus and mimics shading with the edge of your graphite.