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   This page is dedicated to all of you doing real digital art on a ludicrous budget. By real art I mean to exclude mere button pressing ( ooh, mommy, i'm an artist now-i can press the "emulate picasso" button on top of a scanned photograph ) and by the second remark I mean to exclude the "need" for overbloated, over-hyped, and overpriced apps...wich means nothing here uses Adobe's photo$hop, for instance.
   All art in these pages uses either Jasc's paint shop pro or Fractal Design's painter 5. Morphing was done with HiJaak Morph 1.0 from STOIK Software. All art is done directly on screen, using nothing but an old mouse ( tm ? :) ) and some good will. I don't presently own a scanner, art pad, or anything of the sort, and I don't use fancy plug-in's. That's not to say I have anything against that stuff, I just mean that if you ( like me ) can't affoard them there is no reason to make that an excuse not to draw on the computer. Stop using lack of funds as an excuse and get to work, dear would-be-artist, you already have what you need inside you. You don't need photo$hop or the latest plug-in$ unless you want to draw photo-realistic coke bottles or other "important" stuff for advertising. Those people do demand profe$$ionalism, but then again if it's money you're after, there's no reason for you to complain, is there ? Just see it as an investment and happy rat race for you.
Art, on the contrary, can be and is often done with nothing more than a piece of charred wood. Once that is understood, all worries can be put to rest. 

   These are actually the first and last images of a  morph animation still under construction, the one on the right having been mirrored and the whole thing mixed together. It's sort of a celebration of my 26th birthday ( and consequent reminder of my impending decay ), as the lovely girl on the left decays before your eyes into the unavoidable end on the right. You can get a preview version of the animation here. It's about 300 k in zip format, wich unzips into a .avi file.
   It is not very high quality ( au contraire, actually :)), but since the full animation presently has 11 megs, I suppose you'll apreciate the need for a compressed format. As usual, I have drawn this image mostly in paint shop pro, with a touch of painter 5, starting from a blank screen and using my old and trusty mouse.
   The drawing was made with the charcoal tool, the light-up and push tools, and of course the mirror tool was used for joining the two original drawings.