Author notes

Just a Stage: Opening

horque

on June 3, 2008

Seems to bit a bit of "interest" in my use of CorelDraw to create Just a Stage (and Dog the Spot). I am a long time user of a huge variety of computer graphics creation programs. At university in the early 1980s, I co-developed a simple animation program which was run on a miniframe coded on paper tape. With the arrival of the Mac, I used MacPaint and MacDraw. My use of bitmapped images continued through SuperPaint, Studio 8, Photoshop (all the way back to version 1), PhotoPaint, Painter, and so on. I used a variety of vector image too, moving to CricketDraw, CorelDraw, Illustrator, Freehand, TeX and pure Postscript. Collisions between the two came up from time to time, with Canvas and Expression (years before Microsoft got their hands on it). Desktop Publishing was there too, from Ventura, to Ready Set Go, to Pagemaker, to Quark XPress, to InDesign. I was always impressed by the feature set that Corel had. They often introduced features later picked up by the others, even if they never got it quite right. These days, I mainly use CorelDraw and PhotoPaint, and find them to do what I need. I found myself unable to focus properly on my pen on paper, so decided to continue cartoons digitally. Vector based suits me better, as it basically makes the cartoons infinitely scalable. Also note that this is the first Just a Stage strip ready to go with more than 3 days to spare (mainly because I will have a busy weekend at the end of May, start of June).