Angela Porter

I woke a bit earlier than usual this morning, and while I was coming around I watched an Autodesk Sketchbook Pro tutorial by Trent Kaniuga – Sketchbook Pro for Absolute Beginners and came across an explanation and use of a tool I’d not worked out for myself.

This is the selection tool, and it’s a great way to select areas for adding colour, texture and/or effects to as well as copying, pasting, moving, rotating, resizing and so on. It does mean I need to use my keyboard along with my Microsoft Surface Slim Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio. That means using the screen at a different angle to my usual, which is a good thing I think as I now can’t hunch over the screen.

It was the way that when an area is selected and colour or texture is applied, the colour/texture only applies to that selected area, or areas. It masks the rest of the image from the selected areas.

This is going to be so useful for me going forward, now I’ve played with the techinique. It’s given me an elegant way to do something I’ve previously achieved by the use of layer after layer after layer.

I’ve been working with it to add colour to this mandala design from a collection of mandalas I’m working on.

The colours and textures remind me of polished stones, perhaps mosaic pieces. I’ve used fairly complementary colours, but they don’t quite play off each other as much as I’d like. I am, however, going to work with these colours going forward to complete the mandala.