Sketching Software Wanted

 I like to sketch my dreams. A picture can indeed say more than a thousand words, and sometimes looking at a sketch can instantly bring back the memory of the dream. This can be very handy if I don't wave the time to write it out in detail in the morning. Some dreams feel like long stories, or they have interesting world-building ideas. I want to save those memories, and sketching works well. Free, online software has been the way to go, especially the ones that work in the web browser independently of OS.

The first software I used was something called ArtPad. The site has shut down, and every sketch that was saved on the site went down with it. I did download a few images so that they could be posted to forums, only a handful survive now. 

This was what ArtPad looked like. This dream gave me inspiration for a real life floral arrangement.

After ArtPad went down, I started using DeviantArt's built in sketcher "muro". It worked well, but both the painting app and the site itself has become increasingly more bloated over time, so I have drifted apart from it. Some of my more memorable dreams have been illustrated in this app, and I have many good memories of the site. If it would ever become more lightweight in use, I would probably start using it regularly again. 

This is drawn in DeviantArt Muro, and depicts a dream about the afterlife. I have had several dreams about this transitional stage. The surface they walk on is snow.

Sketch.io seems promising with its multi platform support, but something about it just doesn't sit right with me. I miss the simple and intuitive transparent layering of the two previous platforms. 

This was drawn very quickly. I can't remember if it was made in sketch.io or on a sketching app on the phone. 

Lately I have had the guilty pleasure of using Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI, for generating quick sketches of dream scenes in the morning. I understand that this isn't sustainable. Sometimes it is spot on, but about half of the prompts I have given it has just not been drawn right. It seems to especially have a problem with getting the number of characters right in scenes. Comic book styles are rendered very well. The image to the right is the most successful one so far. The dialogue was added later by me in Photoscape X.

What else is out there? Am I missing something? I'm not looking for smartphone only apps. I'm looking for simple apps, that work on a Windows computer, where I can draw with a map. It needs to have an easy to use way to adjust opacity, so I can use transparent layers to mix colours like I'm used to.

The Tetris Effect stole my sleep

The bedroom is quiet and cool, the bed is soft, the sheets are smooth. I lie down and relax, so sleepy that not even a daydream will stay in my head. I drift off...only to see the game I played before bed vividly in front of my eyes. It repeats over and over and over again forming the same patterns.

I have been playing a clicker RPG on my phone for the last few days. It is a game where your damage is determined by how fast you can tap the screen, and you have a team of followers who deal constant DPS. The numbers rise exponentially with each new follower. Last night, I entered an in-game tournament. This made me spend more than an hour on it directly before going to sleep.

It looks like that the pattern of taps and numbers has gotten stuck in my brain. All night, in the non REM sleep stage, where I should have been comfortably unconscious and resting, has this game been playing in my mind. Where I should have seen random scenes and lines of sleep, I have seen coins explode out of beaten enemies. Even in my dreams, things kept increasing exponentially; tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions...

Yesterday's game isn't the first game to cause this for me. The most annoying side effect was from Diablo 1. I was constantly going down to lower levels for several nights. Ingress has also had a strong effect. I was making lines and triangles not only in my half sleep hallucinations, but in my nightly dreams.

This is called the Tetris Effect. It isn't limited to computer games. My mother has told me about how she has spent entire nights with visions of knitting after learning new patterns. Psychologists think this has something to do with learning and subconsciously forming memories. I think it means that I played that game too much yesterday.

Chaotic randomness

I have been going through my image files lately, making backups and gathering files together on my computer. Among all the photos of flowers and the sky, I found some half forgotten "art". I call it "art" and not art, because these are randomly generated fractal images. I must admit that I know very little about fractals, but they are still fun to play with, The program I used to use is called Chaotica. It is free. In fact, a lot of the "artwork" on this site is made in Chaotica.

The way I use it, the first step is always a random flame. The program presents you with nine different random outputs, and you choose one. I usually choose the one that looks the most calm and ordered. From there, I tweak individual settings until it looks like I want it to.

This is the Blue Planet Eater. It is inspired by a terrifying dream about exactly that: a planet eater. It looked vaguely snail-like and was the size of a planet.

This is called "Fire Dragons", because after I adjusted the palette, the dragons stood out to me.

I couldn't call this anything else than the Rainbow Nebula.

This one doesn't have a title yet. This one has less randomness and more manual tweaking than most of my images so far.

All of these were made a couple of years ago. I have recently rediscovered and reinstalled Chaotica, because of the backup work. The resolution and size is limited in the free version, but it works well enough for me.