Art by Ben Hartnett

It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn an aeroplane! I felt like doing some random painting so I sat down with Twistedbrush Open Studio and this is what turned up. The aircraft isn’t any particular type, although the Sea Fury and Spitfire came to mind while painting. It took maybe two hours to do.

This is my new profile picture for Threadless.com, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s sharper, brighter, and more eye-catching than my previous attempt. I also had a much larger version to post here but there was I problem: I painted it in the free version of Twistedbrush (Twistedbrush Pro Studio). It has an odd saving system which seems to make it very easy to lose a lot of work, as I discovered; I scaled the picture down and couldn’t undo, plus it apparently wrote over the file I had saved in case of this event. In hindsight, my foresight was wasted.

Twistedbrush also appears to lack the ability to select part of a layer and move it, which I wanted for an eye adjustment. Plus, while it can save in .psd format, it doesn’t seem to save layers in .psd. There’s more but these are the main problems so far. This is all unfortunate since I really like the software. The brushes feel nice, the interface feels accessible, and there are some cool ideas in how different things are implemented. I think I’ll see if the negatives have been corrected in the demo of the full version. There’s still lots of potential here.

I recently joined threadless.com and had to come up with a profile picture. My first effort was a response to a challenge by a friendly welcomer and was fun but I decided to change it. The above picture of a rusting brain was painted in the free version of Twistedbrush with a Graphire 3.