Welcome to the Sketchpad. This page is just here for fun. I figured that not everyone has easy access to a drawing program and considering that just about everyone did draw when they were children it might be a good idea to provide an outlet for your creative genius or random doodling excursions. Whether you think your an amazing draughtsmen already or your on the growing list of people that likes to tell me that they "can't even draw a stick figure" it doesn't matter. Creating and manipulating color and line, is a great way to take your "mind off of things" even if it's just for a minute or two.. Art is beneficial to all who indulge. You don't have to be a full time artist to enjoy the therapeutic and intellectual benefits of drawing something. So draw something now. It's fun. I swear. I actually use this page often which is another reason that I created it. I like to work out ideas here as well. You can see what I have been making in the Sketches catagory

SAVING YOUR DRAWING:

Here is the only way that I know for you to save your drawing. It can be done on both a PC and a MAC. See instructions below. I would be interested to see what you have drawn if you save it. Email me with a link or attach the drawing. I'd love to see it. For now I am saving the drawings that I do by using the "screen capture' function on my computer. Here's how that works.

PC users (taken from an article on About.com) See full article here

1. Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. 2. Open an image editing program, such as Microsoft Paint. 3. Go to the Edit menu and choose Paste. 4. If prompted to enlarge the image, choose Yes. 5. Optional: Use your image editor's crop tool to crop out unnecessary portions of the screen shot. 6. Go to the File Menu and choose Save As. 7. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the image. 8. Type a file name for the image. 9. Select a file type. 10.Click the Save button.

MAC users

1. Press Cmd + Shiift + 4 2. You will see the mouse cursor turn into a crosshair which you can then use to click and drag a selection box around any part of the screen that you want to take a picture of. 3. The result will be a .PNG file that will end up on the desktop of your computer. 4. Open your favorite image editing program and do what you like from there.

USEFUL TIPS:

1. Notice the 3 buttons at the bottom left of the sketchpad. The "Border" button will place a dark border around your drawing as if it had been custom framed. "Blank" will remove the border. The "Thumbs" button will bring up small windows that artist's use called thumbnails. These are generally used to work out compositions in a small, easy to work in, area. If the relationship of shapes, including light areas to dark areas looks good in the little thumbnail image than it will probably look good if you can recreate that composition in the big drawing as well. Try drawing an image on the full sketchpad first and turn the "thumbs" option on after your done. The resulting compositions in the small boxes will generally be much stronger visually than the large image. 2. All of the images that I've created using this sketchpad have been done using a Wacom drawing tablet. It makes drawing much easier than using a mouse. If you are restricted to a mouse you can still use the sketchpad. I've done some pretty interesting things using the mouse to draw with before I had a Wacom tablet. Try picking the "clear screen function from the top and using the resulting "large brush size" to make big splashes of color covering the white of the page entirely. After that you can draw back into it with any color plus one of the smaller brushes. You can get some pretty interesting effects that way.

Other than that create away and Have Fun!!!