Last Thursday (Nov-26 2009) I bought a graphics tablet. That's something I used to dream when I was actively drawing (years around 1990), but at that time, I didn't have money to buy one, and the drawing programs were rare, clumpsy, commercial and expensive. At those times, we used to use DOS in PC computers, and Windows 3.11.

And, you know, words "mouse" and "drawing" should never be used in the same sentence.

Years passed. I lost interest to drawing somewhere in mid-90's, mainly because it is so laborious (I used ink pencils, watercolors, color pencils, watercolors, copy machine to increase contrast, and so on), and have only occasionally made some pictures. Instead of drawing, I learned to play guitar (not very well), started to write stories (better than my guitar playing), and of course, all these years I have played around with computers and programming.

Then it came. There was a story, and there was a person suggesting to offer it to be published in a collection, and then there was some discussion about illustrating the stories. I got inspired first to illustrate my story (with pencil & paper, scanner, printer, clipart and GIMP), and then I thought why not to try illustrations to other writers' stories, too. It was fun, but time-consuming: draw, scan, fit together, print, draw more, scan, fit together, go back, print previous work, draw something different on it, scan, fit together, ...

And then I decided to buy a drawing tablet. I fell in love with that immediately. It makes drawing fun, again. I have a whole new world to experiment, especially the world of colors - computer and tablet make it easy to do colored drawings, but I have not used to that and I'm still too careful using their full potential. As you might see, I use them like watercolors, or colored pencils, and I'm not used to that you can always modify coloring, making it brighter or darker, unlike with real colors.

But anyways, let's see what I learn in future, and what direction make drawing goes.