Not buying a book
One reason I went to Westfields today was to buy a copy of The Painter IX Wow! Book at Borders. I've had a working copy of Painter for a while now, and am keen to explore and use it. In the event, I didn't, and here's why.
Firstly, I have Painter X, which is one version on, and there is a version of the book for X out there somewhere. Secondly, the borders price was $A 75 and I considered that a bit excessive, considering that the uni library has a copy anyway. In fact, as I'll be doing my Masters for 4 years, I'll have plenty of opportunity to bottow that if I need to.
Two things that have been frustrating me have been attempts to use my graphics tablet (which might be solved by getting a different table) and the high learning curve of Painter. The book mentioned above looked really instructive on the ins and outs of Painter. I've decided to use painter to scan and colour my next few web comic pages, so we'll see how that goes. The uni library had a copy of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book: Creative Techniques in Digital Painting (golly, these long titles seem like they were written by pamphleteers in the 17th century or something) and borders also had it too, but $73 is a bit much to pay for asuch a thin book.
Anyway, what I actually bought was a book on life in ancient Rome, which only cost $A 25, and felt much happier doing so. The othe $50 can be spent on other things like maybe digital tuners or (gasp) bought software.
Also in the uni library that I borrowed today were Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artists Handbook and Character Design for Graphic Novels. The first looks very interesting, though I suspect I ought to read the "Wow" book first. The second I thought was an Ilex book, as it has a lot of artwork I've seen in Ilex books about web comics and graphic novels in it. Since I'm about to start work on twographic novels, I thought this'd be worth reading.
And the moral of the (non) story is - use your local libraries before spending money - it can be cheaper that way!