As you can see above (select images to get bigger views) and how you can see in detail below (see image 03) you select tool palette choices by clicking on an icon in the radial dial interface, and then sliding the mouse or tablet pen to a clock like array of sub-menu choices. In the view below I have chose the Default Brushes tool icon and then chose the Hard Eraser.

03 - SketchBook Pro Tool Palette

The company (Autodesk, formerly Alias) calls this type of interface a Marking Menu™ interface because it allows the user to use a "flick of the pen" like gesture to select a tool. This method of selecting tools becomes incredibly natural feeling after working with the application for a couple of days. Pretty soon, you realize the gesture-like nature of the tool feels first-hand.

Painting - The Heart of the Application

Painting is arguably the heart of the application. And SketchBook Pro 2 has both pencils, paintbrushes, and markers to use to draw, as well as an airbrush tool, pens and felt tip markers, and a chisel tip pen.

New in the application is the ability to interactively scale a brush. By holding down the B key while you have a brush selected, a circle appears indicating the "changed-to" brush size. This arguably makes it quicker to move to minor modifications in brush stroke size without having to change brushes or establish custom brushes. (see image 04).

04 - Interactive Brush and Erasure Resize

A new Brush Property palette (see image 05) provides further options for specific brush settings such as flow, hardness, slant and other modifiers -- depending on the brush type.

05 - Brush Properties Palette

To paint with different colors you select the color wheel. Colors are handled differently between the Mac OS X and Windows versions. This is due to the underlying color picker technology in both operating systems. Both versions allow you to choose from standard color wheels, however only the Mac OS X version allows you to develop a custom color palette as well.

06 - Establishing Custom Color Palette

SketchBook Pro 2 takes advantage of built-in functionality in Mac OS X to do this. By spotting a color on the color wheel in Mac OS X you can then drag this color to one of the empty white boxes at the bottom of the Colors palette.

Next page: Sketching Differences

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