I don’t know how many of you are going to find this interesting, but part of my declutter and organizing is making use of the various electronics and other items at my disposal. Plus I don’t have an art blog right now, so even though it barely qualifies I don’t have another option. Hope you can follow along and find it interesting. If not, today’s a good day to do your own project or check out some of my old ones. Yesterday was about the art space. While I’ve organized my physical art space more than once the digital side has not gotten much love. This week I started working on that.

In the corner where my art stuff setup is there isn’t much in the way of electric plugs. So I have a laptop with extension cord that fits nicely into the art desk that serves as the digital side of my artistic setup. I use the Parblo A610 seen above because I prefer it to the tablet monitor. I’m not one of the people who has a disconnect between monitor and drawing hand, possibly because of all the digital coloring and image editing I already did prior. The laptop is fine for my needs (except it can’t run 3D, including the virtual drawing mannequins in Clip Studio Paint) but I haven’t maximised the software with all the tools I need. Yesterday I decided to work on that…and got one and a half things out of five done. Still worth discussing.

I had five goals for this week’s project, though I had a feeling I wouldn’t get to them all:

  • X match the PSP interface to CSP (spelling error fixed)
  • -install fonts
  • -install brushes
  • -install picture tubes and other PSP stuff
  • -transfer test pencils and photos

The one with the X is the only task I completed, but not to my satisfaction. Here’s how I set up the workspace in Clip Studio Paint, my prefered software for comic creation.

I like this program for a number of reasons, one being how versatile the workspace is. I can move taskbars and other windows for using the tools almost wherever I want. Where I have to sit and wanting everything at reach, all of the tool stuff is shoved to the right, with the drawing area where I can see it on my left. Every digital artist has their own system.

Unfortunately, Paint Shop Pro, which I use for photos and other image editing, doesn’t have the same level of versatility. I got as close as I could but each window has to be moved away separately if I want to clear some extra room. There are some toolbars I’d like to put elsewhere but can’t. I got the two of them as close as I could, but that’s not the only unity I was hoping for. I also wanted to get all the shortcuts that the Parblo uses to match up between both programs, which I totally forgot to do. Have to remember to fix that.

I did manage to transfer a bunch of files from my desktop to the “artputer” (art computer, but I’m guessing most of you still with us figured that out) and install a few digital brushes into Clip Studio, but I still need to figure out how to do it with Paint Shop Pro. And these aren’t the only digital art software at my disposal, just the two I use the most and thus the ones I want to get working first. Ultimately I want to really learn how to use both, and I did learn a few tips about organizing the workspace and tools I didn’t before. I even managed to find a few junk files to delete and got a few fonts on the computer. However, I need to go to the back-up drive and find more of the stuff I want to put on here.

It’s progress in the end but not all the progress I wanted to make. One thing I’ve learned is just how behind I am with stuff. Working on this also gave me the opportunity to get through the YouTube backlog of shows I only need to listen to most, if not all, of the time, which was a nice bonus. So it’s progress and maybe with the heavy work started I can do a bit during the week and have a more interesting topic for next weekend. We’ll see what happens.