Many have noted that Autodesk Sketchbook‘s brush range is paltry on its desktop PC version - compared to the iPad version or to the oceans of custom brushes available for Adobe Photoshop. Just choose the Windows 7 drivers for it, and they work fine… So I blew the dust off it, and found there are 64-bit drivers for it that work on Windows 8.1. I’d forgotten I’d got the 6″ x 9″ (effective) USB version. I was spurred into thinking about 2D sketch/paint software by finding my old Wacom Intuos 2 pressure-sensitive pad and stylus in a drawer. And it arguably has better brushes, provided you don’t want thick glistening wet gloopy oils. It’s not Photoshop either, but it’s much nicer to learn and use than Painter. So I’m taking another look at Autodesk Sketchbook (which you can currently pick up on Amazon UK for a mere £20 ). And yet I find that Photoshop, near-perfect as it is, just doesn’t make for a natural sketching application - no matter how many nicely-tweaked custom brushes I load into it. Should I install that old version of Painter, perhaps? I always wanted to like Painter, the natural media painting software. I’m six months in with my new PC, and it’s time to install some of the bits and pieces that were not absolutely vital back in a chilly early January.
