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Unleash Your Art

If you're the type of person with a fridge door full of napkin doodles and every free space on every corkboard in your room is covered by even more artistic renderings, then maybe it's time for you to unleash your absentminded art and take it to a whole new level with a little computer savvy.

Before you can do anything cool with your doodles, you need to get them into your computer, and that's easily done with a scanner. There are all kinds of scanners available -- document scanners, photo scanners, all-in-one scanners -- so pick one that fits your price range and artistic needs. For most doodles, just about any scanner should do, so don't sweat this aspect of it too much.

An even cooler method would be to sketch your doodle onto your harddrive using a Digital Pen Tablet, such as the Bamboo Fun Medium Pen Tablet or the Intuos3 4x6 USB Tablet. Using a pressure-sensitive electronic pen, you can "draw" your images onto a digital pad and have them appear right on your screen.

Once your doodle is on your computer, the real fun begins! There is some truly amazing software available that makes turning doodles into art a cinch. Snap Art allows you to apply painterly effects to you artwork, rendering extraordinarily lifelike brush strokes, pastel lines, or even thick impasto layers of digital paint. Other programs like Painter X have a variety of composition tools to assist you, plus are compatible with a wide range of digital pen tablets so you draw right into the program and even export the resulting art into other programs like Photoshop CS3 or Illustrator CS3 for further manipulation. You can even add lovely lighting effects with programs like Mystical Lighting.

Once you have completed your masterpiece, you'll be happy to know there are all sorts of venues for the exhibition of your art thanks to the Internet. Websites such as Deviant Art and Amateur Illustrator allow you to post your art and have it showcased with other works by other artists all over cyberspace. You can also free your artwork from the confines of your computer by printing out copies using Flickr or even make t-shirts at Threadless, and stickers at Sticker Guy.

-Guest columnist E. Ott