A hot little program from japan has just made it alot easier to draw with your friends and allow people to see just exactly how you draw. This program is called OpenCanvas.

OpenCanvas is a free photoshop/painter alternative. It has some of the best options from both programs, with a few nice improvements. For one, it allows a person to connect with up to 4 other people using the program to allow a full on sketch fest. The other neat thing you can do with it is export your drawing as a WPE file which is essentially a vector recording of every stroke you made during the drawing. Allowing would be onlookers to get the inside scoop on EXACTLY how you made that drawing. It's twice as good as an html tutorial and the filesize is probably 3 times smaller, with most WPE's weighing in at around 500k or so.

OpenCanvas is produced by PortalGraphics . But unless you speak japanese, that site won't do you any good. So for the rest of us, someone has been kind enough to put up a cool tutorial on how to use the program, along with a link to download it, and all in english. That can be found here.

According to a friend, it doesn't work on the mac though, sorry about that. I think that this program is great, and even the most staunch of Photoshop enthusiasts should give it a try if not only to give us all a taste of how YOU draw.

And since I still have my soapbox, I think I'll go into detail about some parts of the program that the tutorial page left out, but I found to be confusing. The layers.

When you make a layer, under the edit pulldown in the layer panel you have three options. Combine, copy, and copy. Huh? Two copies? Let me explain this. The first, combine, actually is a flatten command. It allows you to flatten all your layers into one, but only if all the layers are X'ed (there are three layer options. X, +, and -). X is normal. + is add mode, and - is subtract mode. The first copy option is indeed a copy command. It will copy the current layer. The second copy command, however, is actually a merge down command. It will combine the current layer with the layer below it, no matter what the layer mode is. Handy.

Anyways, I thought I'd introduce this fantastic tool to everyone who hasn't heard of it yet. Since I intend to start uploading .WPE's to this site, and eventually don't want to have to explain in each one just what the heck a .WPE is, and if you wanna get together sometime and draw with me, just IM me.