Test #1

Wow! I've been away for more than a year You know how sometimes people go away and come back months later and they excuse the hiatus by saying that real life got to them? Well, I don't have a life, but I do have a job which is worse. In any case, I've decided to take this time to get acquainted with different free softwares, because you can only mooch off other people's Photoshop for so long That's why I took on this crazy quest for the best program, which will hopefully result in some pretty dolls I'll share here with you. Hopefully is the keyword. They have a common theme which is made-up historical clothing, because if I'm into dolling is because of the pretty dresses. 

This was done on Paint.NET which was interesting to use.  Working with transparency isn't as fast and fluid as it is with Photoshop or Gimp, but once you get used to it, you can work with it and adjusting it manually becomes natural. I did learn quite a few blending tricks with this system, which is always great. I do miss having two windows open for the same file, that avoided a lot of zooming in and out. But there's a button at the bottom of the window that allows you to switch to a 100% view with one click. That's very handy when you work with smaller pieces like this one. I do love how fast and smoothly it ran. It didn't crash, even when I accidentally went back over 20 steps in the history window. It did lag a bit there (it had to, poor thing), but I could see the doll undo itself back to its sketchy glory one step at a time as it did so, and that was very entertaining.

And that's it for this doll. I'll be back next year with the second doll. I'm kidding! At the pace I work now I need at least two years.