Andy Chase

I've played around with the GIMP before, but until I sat down with my Wacom Graphire tablet last night, I'd never actually tried to produce a finished graphic with it. This tiki is that graphic. (Apologies to Shag. I know it's terribly derivative, right down to that nifty wood texture technique. But you gotta start somewhere.)



The interface takes some getting used to; after 6 years of Photoshop I'm used to having all of the pulldown menus across the top of the main program window- with GIMP they're accessible with a right click on top of the image you're working with. It's a usability tradeoff; it's an extra click, but you don't have to move the cursor all the way to the top of the screen. There are lots of little things like that.



But overall, it is an amazingly full-featured program. as open source advocates always like to add, "And it's 100% FREE!".