90 Minutes to Make a Circle

So it is the weekend, but there was still work on the project. This time, its was creating following three images for the Connect Four game:

Board Tile	Red Chip	Black Chip

All told, it took an hour and a half to do these simple drawings. I started off opening paint and every time I tried to draw a circle it ended up slightly flattened, and I could not just modify the circle properties itself by dragging them around. Not to mention trying to get these to a 100x100 pixel size tile. Okay, so I download GIMP. And I am now even more confused on to how I do I make a circle. One last try for something in the middle, Paint.Net. Between flailing with GIMP and a little of of previous knowledge on layers an what not, I get the above images created Friday evening.

After a good dinner and some rest, I head over to B&N to peruse the Computer Graphics section. And yes, for those that were saying to yourself, why were you using those programs in the first place, I now understand that I was using the completely wrong type of tool for this part of the project. I was using raster-based image manipulation tools when I was thinking in vector-based terms.

Suffice to say, I was never really a graphic artist of any sort, so I was not aware of the difference in tools for computer graphics. I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler. Which could have been a problem since I wanted to go in to mechanical drawing, when I was in High School. Fortunately for me, that was also the beginning of AutoCad, so I did not really need to master drawing with a pencil. There I created a 3D wireframe model of the Space Station, but never did any surfacing or animation. Back then it took long enough to render the complete model as a wireframe.

Since then I think that all graphical drawing programs are based off of AutoCad and as such, I should just be able to tell it to create a circle and place it where I wanted it. Not go and center it pixel by pixel and hope both sides look right.

I plan on spending more time working on my digital graphic skills, though I plan to keep it mostly 2D. Third-person Isometric games were good enough for Diablo, so it is good enough for me.