What is Dabbler 1.0?

Fractal Design's new paint program is notable right off the bat for a number of reasons. First version 1.0 is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms as well as for Power Macs. Second, you get 16-bit color and a remarkably powerful paintbox for the price; and unlike Fractal Design’s professional-class Painter, Dabbler is fast and responsive on LC- and Performa-class Macs. Third, Dabbler provides lessons from the well-known Walter Foster learn-to-draw series, both in the 50-page printed manual and in an on-screen tutorial.

Dabbler adopts the metaphor of a sketchbook on top of a drawing table that’s fitted at the top with four drawers. Using a ⌘-key or clicking on a drawer front toggles each drawer open or closed with a satisfying snap. The tool drawer contains a simplified selection of the “natural materials” found in Fractal Design’s other paint programs; the most recently selected tools display on the front of the drawer (whether open or closed), keeping them conveniently close at hand. Most tools give you the option of small, medium, and large points (as opposed to the professional tools’ infinite variability); switching sizes produces an audible ping — a different pitch for each size. An “extras” drawer opens automatically whenever a selected tool has options or special effects to offer. The color drawer contains 16 customizable palettes, including 8 gradients. You can reverse each texture in the papers drawer with a click of the button, yielding 40 drawing surfaces.

Dabbler’s operation is generally intuitive and easy to learn, but Fractal Design took some bold liberties with the interface that may confound seasoned Macintosh users. For example, ⌘-O does not open a painting but instead imports a graphic from another program (it works with PICT, TIFF, Adobe Photoshop, and various Windows formats). To work on an existing Dabbler painting, you open the tool drawer, click on the sketchbook icon, and page through until you reach the picture you want. Then when you close the tool drawer, the painting appears on the drawing table. Pictures save automatically to the sketchbook in Dabbler format; you can also save files in the common Mac and Windows graphics formats. To delete a work, just drag it off the open sketchbook and into the adjacent trash can; a pushpin inside the tool drawer lets you temporarily remove a page so you can reorder it in the sketchbook.

Other deviations from standard Macintosh conventions take even more getting used to. For example, in place of the Mac’s familiar selection tools. Dabbler uses a series of stencil tools — rectangle, oval, star, heart, free-form, and polygon — and requires you to select a separate float tool to move a selection. Additional stencil tools let you apply surface textures that you choose from the textures drawer, and you can also apply Photoshop filters. Dabbler has no line tool, but you can select Draw Freehand or Draw Straight Lines from the Options menu. Another oddity is that to apply gradients or text at an angle, you must use the page-rotate tool to turn your sketch. Finally, Dabbler makes good use of keyboard shortcuts, but there’s still too much opening and closing of drawers for my taste.

Now, can Dabbler really teach you to draw? Just possibly.

First, don’t be fooled by the old-fashioned Walter Foster sketches. If you faithfully practice the follow-along drawings in the manual’s instructional pages, you might just achieve some commercial-art skills. True, the woman’s profile looks suspiciously like that of a young Greta Garbo, and the perky bunny looks like Disney’s Thumper, but this lends the lessons a measure of charm and whimsy. No matter what drawing style you ultimately develop, the content of Foster’s lessons is genuinely useful and applicable: rules of proportion and perspective, advice on sketching wdth pencil or charcoal before proceeding to ink — and some words of encouragement as well.

On the other hand, while it’s entertaining to watch sample drawings take shape before your eyes, I question the value of the recorded sessions that you can play back (frame by frame or at full speed) via VCR-type controls. If you’re quick, you’ll see the icons change when a new tool is selected, and some drawings have captions explaining the operations currently under way. But I didn’t find it useful to watch the disembodied lines accrue on the page.

More significantly, perhaps, the Walter Foster drawing system was designed for natural materials — chalk, pencil, and so on — not electronic paint programs that emulate natural materials, and not all the techniques are transferable to the digital sketchpad. Wether you draw with the mouse (which I don’t recommend) or with a pressure-sensitive stylus and tablet, the physical act of sketching on screen requires a different kind of hand-eye coordination from that needed for sketching on paper. Dabbler does a good job of re-creating the appearance of, say, charcoal on a toothy paper, but once on screen, pixels are pixels: it’s hard to erase your pencil guidelines and leave only the ink-brush lines.

The manual is divided into two sections, one on the Dabbler application and one on the Foster lessons. The Dabbler portion does a fine job of introducing the program’s tools and interface, but lessons on digital painting techniques would be helpful, especially when it comes to Dabbler’s admirably advanced features, including its ability to acquire images directly from scanners, its autocloning capability, and a tracing-paper mode.

The Last Word

Whether you opt to study the Walter Foster drawing method or go it alone, the key to artistic skill is practice, practice, practice. By providing an excellent paint set with an appealing if slightly quirky interface at a great price. Dabbler makes it easy to stick with the program.

Baer, Marjorie. (November 1994). Dabbler 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 55).

Download Dabbler 1.0 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II