Well, I’m stuck on the sofa, again.
And my daughter is around so I can’t give vent to my frustration by fragging scary mutants on Fallout in a mess of blood and guts. How sad.

On the other hand, being forced to keep a horizontal position gives me the chance to experiment with two things I saved for a situation like this.

The first one, maybe the less incredibly awesome of the two, is Posemaniacs, a resource for nude sketching. I actually tried its online version yesterday on my computer, but since today it’s hard to sit down for more than two minutes I gave it a go with the iPhone app, called Random Pose, while laying on the couch.

Random pose is pretty basic but functional. It displays the 3d model of a human in a random position, textured with muscular anatomy. You can zoom in and out and pan the model but not rotate it, and you randomly get either a male or a female. It’s perfect if, as an exercise, you want to draw someone in an unusual position but you haven’t got any naked people at hand. Or if the bunch of visually interesting people around you look more likely to kick the crap out of you if you even rather then appreciate being sketched onto your pad.

I have a wonderful pocket Paperblanks sketchbook (get one for yourself, they’re beautiful), which is about as big as an iPhone. This means that you can hold the left side of the sketchbook and the iPhone together with one hand while you draw with the other one.
This way – hypothetically – someone could even draw while sitting on the toilette. Hypothetically.
Anyway, the online version is pretty much the same thing, with more choice on the kind of position plus and a nice feature called “30 seconds drawing”, which – guess what? – displays a new model every thirty seconds and forces you to be really quick.
The only flaw is that you only have one kind of body build displayed. No fat, thin, young or old people. But hey, it’s free, you can’t be picky.
In order to force myself to draw on a regular basis I’m going to post a small sketch on my sidebar. There, I said it, I have to do it now. These are the ones I did today.

The most awesome thing I tried today is Sketchbook mobile. It’s another useful tool for drawing when in a potentially boring situation. Say on a train, on a bus or stuck with a back ache.

It basically works like Colors for Nintendo DS, but it has lots more features and you draw with your fingers rather than a stylus.
The good thing is that it’s in your phone, so you no longer have to carry any gear for the eventuality of a casual sketch session.

It allows up to ten layers with a good number of options to manage them; a fairly high number of undos (haven’t checked the limit yet); a decent number of brushes; eraser and mirror mode.
The cool thing is that you can also email yourself the psd file with all the layers if you want to fine-tune it, or export it as a jpg to your library if you’re happy with it.

All in all I love it.
There’s a free version with a few basic features, while the full one costs a risible amount.
I saw on their website that the pc version might be pretty cool, but as I have Photoshop I didn’t really care.

I guess it’s ok if you don’t need a pack of features for an incredible amount of money but still want to mess around with digital painting.
Anyway, this is what I did in about half an hour.