Sketches: The Tools and Software

Just a few notes for anyone who wonders how I produce the sketches that appear on the Bose Musicians’ site in the forums section Illustrating Setups.

Tools

I am using a couple of Tablet PCs for this: an HP TC1100 and a Toshiba M200. In another (non-music related life) I use these for doing lectures.

Software

Up until December 2004, I was using Alias Sketchbook which is a wonderful free-hand drawing tool, but it has virtually no editing features except for an eraser. I was also hand drawing most of the instruments with ArtRage.

Around the beginning of the year I had an injury and was having a great deal of trouble holding a pen, so I dug in and started learning Adobe Photoshop. It’s terrific for working with existing images and supports layers and allows you to add text directly to an image. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to help me to create new images. It’s not that kind of tool. The biggest advantage for me at the time, was that I could use a mouse. The net result, was relatively sterile looking drawings. I was incorporating pictures of instruments from the web instead of hand-drawn sketches but at least there is support for drawing straight lines.

I’ve recently upgraded to Alias Sketchbook Pro, that has a richer pallette of tools including layers and the ability to do a little editing with a real "move" function, and layers.

There are other utilities that I use for grabbing images and excerpts from manuals. Among these are the Microsoft Tablet PC Snipping Tool and Techsmith Snag-it.

See my other articles about the process  and principles behind the sketches.