Art Rage 3 is here

I have been trying out the latest version of Art Rage for a few weeks now and am really pleased with it. I have the Studio Pro 3 version as it has the most features. They have improved the interface which was pretty good to start with anyway. Now you can scale the panels and also drop them on a second screen if you have one, to end up with an uncluttered workspace.
There is a 'canvas puck', a little navigator a bit like Photoshop has, but here you can use it to instantly rotate the canvas which is one of the most useful features of Art Rage.
New tools include Watercolors, the 'heavy bleed' setting gives realistic paint deposits, I was really surprised when I tried it out. They have also added Inking pens, and an auto smoothing setting on the pens and the pencil which means you can get that smooth vector-look similar to drawings done in Flash.
Other new stuff: the Gloop pen is good for trippy unexpected results and the Sticker pen which is like the image hose in Painter.
More really handy things are the Fill, Selection and Text tools and a straight-line function which do make life much easier even if they are not strictly drawing tools.
Anyway I definitely think Art Rage has grown up now, the Pro version is more expensive, but I think it's a match for some of the other big fat graphic apps out there!
link to comparison PDF

Drawing with a brush in Flash MX

Bob Flynn is a cartoonist with a great blog called Drip. He writes about using Flash MX to paint and draw. His line work looks very clean but also really natural and hand drawn.
He starts by sketching in a lighter color and then inks making use of the onion skin feature. Flash is quite a fun app to draw with and using the same techniques in this post and quite a bit of patience you can achieve quite a natural line even though drawing with vectors. Read the articles here and here.