The state of Linux art tools

I've never had any formal art training. I did take art in grade 9, but it was a tramatic experience at best. My art teacher for the class was semi-senile, and should have been retired long ago. She may have been a terrific artist, but when a teacher loses a student's work and then orders them to produce another by weeks end, they should be held accountable. I never took an art class after that experience.

I did hang on to my interest in art. Back when the web was still fairly static I worked with Corel's Photo-Paint product, it was a great package, with a very loyal fan following, though nothing the size of Adobe PhotoShop enthusiasts. Photo-Paint helped me through a few design jobs, both for the web and print. But when I moved to Linux, I found that The Gimp was quite different. I'd read the hype that it was powerful, and could do a lot of things Adobe PhotoShop could, not everything, but a lot.



It's only been recently that I latched on to the vector-based Inkscape, a program that lets you create some pretty amazing things, without a lot of skill or graphics experience. I found the Inkscape tutorials good enough that I managed to create the above ANIME image having never created anything like it before.