An Arsenal of Tools - Digital Painting Essentials - page 2

in order to use your entire screen to work on your drawing or painting. It also allows
you to set up as many elements as you want on your screen when you are working.
Any or all of the elements can quickly be brought back to view on your screen using
Interface Controls.
The second set of menu options is Tools and Views . Here you have many of the
options that are available in your toolbar. It is possible to customize your lagoon in
order to place the tools that you use the most. In this way, you can have them read-
ily available and can have your toolbar removed from view to have more space to
work (customization will be covered in the next chapter). One of the default choices
is Zoom/Rotate/Move Canvas. In order to activate the rotate canvas capability, you
will have to set it up in your program preferences. You must go to the Edit menu on
the menu bar, and then choose Preferences . On the General tab, go to Graphics
and check Enable Rotate Canvas . (Note that right under this, there is a notice ask-
ing you to turn this feature off if you experience slow performance.) After you check
the box, you must restart the program and the rotate canvas feature will start work-
ing.
The other default choices in your Tools and Views menu are Fit to View, Ruler, El-
lipse, Layers, Symmetry X, Symmetry Y, and Actual Size.
You will find that when you start drawing, it is important to first choose Fit to View so
that you can see the proper size of the canvas. Without selecting Fit to View, your
image will occupy a very small area of the canvas.
The next set of options is Brushes . The default choices are Pencil, Airbrush, Paint-
brush, Hard Eraser, Brush Palette, Ballpoint Pen, Swap Brushes, and Marker. Swap
Brushes is a feature that allows you to swap the current brush you are using with
the one that you have previously used without opening the Brush Palette window to
look for it. For instance if you are using the Pencil brush and then selecting Eraser
from Brush Palette , instead of opening and closing the Brush Palette window to get
back to your previous brush, you can select Swap Between 2 Brushes in the lagoon
and it will swap back to Pencil. You can do this with any two of your brush options.
Next we have Colors . You can select the colors you want to use from here. Most
of your choices on the lagoon can be customized. You can either use these default
colors or change them to the colors you use most often.