First and foremost, this software is great. Thank you for all your hard work, it’s a joy to use. I try other painting programs but I can’t stand how they feel. All your products just feel clean and clear to me (the alias ones in particular).  All I have to offer in exchange for your wonderful work is my vision of what y’all could do with your technology, for what it’s worth.

Something of a blend of Sketchbook Designer and Maya.  Painting with paint effects brushes is incredible. It’s on par if not better than the paint engine in corel painter. But it’s not usable. One undo and no layers? It’s like painting in real life, with none of the digital advantages.

This is what I’d love to see:

- Paint effects in sketchbook designer with complete with brush customizations.

- Bezier curves as an option, with options to convert between those and the awesome curve system SBD already has. (great “curve engine” btw, it really captures the subtleties of sketching!)

- Maya’s Hovering Color Picker Window is great, again, on par or exceeding the color window popup in corel paint. The current color picker in SBD is unusable for accurate work, imo.

- Hotkeys & Marking Menus. Would you please just bust it out? I’m sure it’s a pain to churn through and implement it, but it can’t be that hard and it’s absolutely essential to any regular user of the thing.  SBP’s marking menus are great, but maya’s would be better, with submenus and custom hotkeys, you could work without the palettes cluttering the screen.

- Navigation Tools. The navigation wheel is cute and all, but I want to navigate without having to “detail mouse” to an area. Like maya where hotkeys dictate the camera tools, I want to press R and rotate the canvas, Z and zoom. (or whatever key) It’s just a clearer way of working, imo.

- Performance. Is quite poor on my machine, and although I’ve optimized to a usable point, it’s still bad. Sketchbook Pro is far superior. It is really bothersome how the OSX window shadows jump with mouse focus around the various palettes. I hope you know what I mean because this is the single most annoying thing about this program. Because of this, I still use SBP for most of my regular work.

- Curve Edits. This is a jumpy feature. Can we have a little more resolution? Also, a way to reset or erase the edits? And, it may not be possible, but I’d like to preserve the brush spacing through curve edits. Like a 3d pfx curve would have. So that no matter how you edited, it would be a “continuous texture” instead of getting broken up.

Editable paint fx sketching, grouping curves, influence curves, some basic procedural texturing perhaps, the ability to save curves like brushes and drop them back onto the canvas, A layer selecting/editing marking menu, coss-file compatibility between maya or illustrator and sbd, it’s fun to imagine. I could go on, but this is the basic picture. 

You have all the recipes for a painting package that would stand far above anything else in the world.  A tool that utilizes all the advantages of working digitally, within an invisible interface, nothing but canvas. Hotkeys, Marking Menus, and Virtual Sliders. These three tools of yours give us an amazing ability to work without an interface. To see nothing but canvas. All your tools right under your mouse, as soon as you need them. Instead of having to mouse across the screen to get to a tiny area button. It’s silly.

Thanks again!