recent sketches oct 25

Sitting in class one day, I realised I hadn't drawn anything creative in months, unintentionally. I started to doodle in my notes and felt a great sense of relief, like I was relaxing a fist that I'd held clenched all this time without noticing.

In the past, I drew digitally a lot. COVID quarantine plus an incredible amount of free time often saw me drawing for upwards of 4 or 5 hours daily. I primarily used a completely legal version of Photoshop CC 2020, and for a while, Clip Studio Paint, before moving onto GIMP and Krita. I never found GIMP appealing for drawing—to me, it was always a photo manipulation software above all, like if Photoshop were more annoying to use—and I was overwhelmed by Krita's defaults. (Though, Krita is still the most comprehensive option for FOSS drawing software out there—I have to thank Соня, one of the most talented artists I know, for getting me to try it more seriously.)

If only there were some ultra-minimal drawing program based on pixel brushes and halftones, without a care given for 500 levels of pen pressure…

Over this weekend I downloaded 100rabbits' drawing software noodle. It is meant to run on the varvara computing system, but emulating it is totally painless. It's rather minimal, and the documentation on the webpage appears to be a bit outdated. noodle only exports files in the .icn format which is a bespoke 1-bit graphics format, simple enough that I could write a script to convert it into the more widely recognized & used .bmp format. Unfortunately, that meant I spent most of my Saturday reading through the specifications for BMP and debugging segmentation faults, instead of a complex analysis problem set. Oh well.

Below are some drawings I did with noodle. (noodle only has black & white, I recolored these in GIMP)

Chouette, a character I've drawn on-and-off for the last 5 years.
Erika and Inge, the other two characters I draw consistently.

100rabbits also has another drawing program, oekaki, which has a larger variety of brushes and textures. I saw nasu, a sprite editor, which I want to try out soon too.

I did this one through the Mini vMac emulator on MacPaint, which is such a charming program. Exporting a MacPaint file from the emulator onto your local machine requires using the Export Fl script and then there are a few scripts you can find online to convert the .pntg file format into a .png or .jpg.

Erika again, demonstrating MacPaint's text tool & variety of halftone patterns.
Rambling

I think it's quite possible to pull off making a zine or some sort of comic in MacPaint, where every canvas could be a panel, and you'd stitch them together in one big page, probably locally. You might have to do some drawing in GIMP or Krita on top of the Frankenstein file if you wanted visuals that overflow the panels, or intersect across different panels.

Also, cinni's oekaki board is great. (All oekaki boards are great.)

It seems like another instance of scarcity motivating creativity. When you're reduced to working with only halftones and line weight to render values, it takes a lot of the decision-making of painting out of the equation, instead leaving you with an entirely different kind of problem to solve. It also helps that these programs are all relatively lightweight, since running Krita or GIMP strains my laptop.

On another note, it helps me feel less guilty about spending my time drawing. The small canvas sizes and the lack of color/pen pressure kind of force me to get the lines down (in other words, reduces the degrees of freedom), and once I refine the lines I'm pretty much finished with the sketch. I think it'll help a lot with getting back to drawing again, since I always say that I want to draw more, but never seem to get around to doing so…

Let me know if you're familiar with other minimalistic, or older drawing programs. I think I'll try some of the ones that SL mentioned here, like 9front's very own paint.