I make my tiles in Corel Photopaint. Although Adobe photoshop may be touted as a
superior program for the creation of bitmaps, Corel is still a powerful program. I bought a digital camera once and with it, they gave me a limited edition of Photoshop5.0 but I have not seen any reason or advantage to changing programs at this juncture of my life. If you've worked in Photopaint as well as in Photoshop, you would probably be able to make those distinctions for yourself. Thank you for your interest and I hope that you weren't among those out there who look at my tiles and bet that I'm creating them with my feet, in Microsoft Paintbrush! Best regards, whirlwind... L.I.E.

Well, actually.. i figured you were using something other than the traditional. I'm acquainted with corel programs (well before i was with adobe, although since I moved to mac, adobe has taken over my life)

How do you manage to work the borders (maintain the appropriate size and drawing space) within corel, however? I admit, I found the program a bit confusing when it came to wanting to do anything in layers or making a selection.

Katherine,
In Corel, there are as many tools, masks, textures etc. as you have in Adobe and I'm pretty sure that they work in the same basic structure. I maintain my border limits by using the rectangle mask and activating only the 128x128 pixel area alloted on the newbie quilting tiles. By dragging adjacent color across the mask and manipulating that color or imagery, I create whatever I do, within my boundaries. When the tile is complete, I use the rectangle to copy the apropos area (128x128) to the clipboard. I minimize the work tile and from the menu, opt for, "new from clipboard" and when the clip comes into my workspace, I use the "resample" dialogue box to view the file particulars where I can see if the tile is exactly square (128x128). If the tile conforms to size, I just open the original download and paste the image directly onto the borderized tile. I was having a problem with my uploading because I was generating other tiles from the master and rather than leave my designation suffix, (a,b,c etc.),
I was striking the suffix out of the file after it was called out by me, into the upload box at ICE. Slothy made me aware of this problem when he advised me that I'd better stop uploading "untouched, originals". After my fifth bogus upload, I realized that unless I renamed the second generation tile, in the program and on my drive, all that I was doing was sending back the same tile that I had downloaded earlier that evening! You are fortunate to work on a MAC because I've heard many people say that the platform is vastly superior to PC based graphics, both for resolution and for color rendition, especially at screen level. When I started doing tiles a month ago, I was working on a 233MHZ Pentium 2 and last week I bought a 1.3GHZ Pentium4 processor with a 64MB video card. My life has also been taken over by my computer and I spend every available waking hour here in Corel. I am a mechanical designer by trade and work in Autocad for 9 hours a day but my nights and weekends belong to the allmighty bitmap... Thank you for your interest Katherine. Ed M.

Well, it sounds like you got the hang of it (the program, that is)...

Have you ever tried pixel art? I hadn't before I came here, but basically it consists of drawing things practically pixel by pixel. When I do my tiles, I've found it easier to work in layers, to maintain the border and be sure I have blended appropriately, the "preserve transparency" tool really cuts down on my worries! Thats the only real benefit i see from using Adobe over Corel for this project.

Well anyways, I'm probably boring you with my remedial discussion of art programs. :> Suffice to say, I like a lot of your tiles, it's too bad that they have blending problems and get voted so low. =(

Good luck with your new computer
(BTW, I started as a mechanical designer as well :> ...)

I'm using Corel Photo-paint too, Katherine, for all my tiles. It's a really great program when you get to know it ;)

Thanks for the tip..

I've used Corel Photo-paint for projects before, so I'm fairly accustomed to it... its just a part of chance that the focus moved to Adobe products. Most of my painting needs have been fulfilled through my wacom tablet and Painter Classic, whenever the 'Shop falls through. :>

As a "Newbie", I guess I've got to make my bones and pay my dues, one pixel at a time. I remember being chided by a fellow tiler, for using photographic images within my compositions, as if this were something for an aspiring bitmap creator to be ashamed of. Would it be an incorrect assumption on my part to believe that photo-manipulation was one of the primary goals of the program's creators or was it intended for a, one pixel at a time, style of work? Somehow, it would seem foolish to me, to have to atone for the sins of graphic art, by building an image, when in today's toolbox there are powerful communication tools like the scanner and the digital camera. Everywhere that I look out there in a commercial and fast paced world, I see the power of imagery and most often, these very tools are there in the background. I work hard at those little tiles that get "screwed down to vote abyss", all in the hope that my work will someday improve to a level that will permit me to participate in projects like the current "Photomanipulative" quilt being put together here on ICE.com. I'll be looking in on that quilt to see whether there is any validity to the use of the common photograph in the graphics world and I'll be paying particular attention to the quality of the blending of each tile into it's adjacent composition. Now that Slothy's newbie quilt, (revenge of the newbies)is complete, I'll hopefully get a better look at the big picture and be better able to differentiate the blenders from the wannabe blenders and most surely see the error of my own ways. I really like being here, (on ice as it were), and when the craving to do more and more tiles sets in, it's worse than a "White Castle Jones". Today, when for some reason, I couldn't get connected to the website, I wondered to myself, how did I get along, before I found my way to this place? Be well Katherine and may all of your tiles be bigger than your problems, whatever they might be...
Ed Martin, LIE