Writing’s on the Wall
All products are BRAND NEW and factory sealed. Fast shipping and 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed.Not even Dionne Warwick and her mind-reading friends could have predicted that, over the course of two CDs, Destiny’s Child would become one of the most successful girl groups on the planet. But successful this Houston trio is, and their sophomore CD shows why. Yes, the lineup changes as often as lead singer Beyoncé’s hairstyle, but fun, disposable pop/R&B needn’t be rooted in permanence, and DC is mad fun and mad catchy to boot. With the assistance of hitmakers Shek’spere and Kandi Burruss, Destiny’s Child trade in effervescent, hip-shaking, finger-wagging, ‘you-go-girl, kick-him-to-the-curb’ anthems. The Writing’s on the Wall is loaded with tracks like “Bills, Bills, Bills,” which are suitable both for dancing and as topics on the Ricki Lake Show. The percolating “Bug A Boo” is irresistible, as is the sassy “So Good.” To their credit, the girls can slow the pace down, and on the sultry “Temptation” they get to work their considerable chops to nice effect. But as sales and chart figures have shown, Destiny’s Child are at their best when they are laying down the law to some trifling man, and/or working their own groove thang. Work it they do on this somewhat formulaic but ultimately irresistible effort. –Amy Linden
List Price: $ 7.99
Price: $ 4.97
Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011
- Autodesk SketchBook Pro offers professional-grade capabilities for artists, designers, and doodlers
- Fast and intuitive user interface; so easy to learn, you will be productive in minutes
- Ultra-responsive and customizable digital pencils, pens, brushes, markers, and airbrushes
- Capture your ideas in writing, typed comments, and sketches… then email them instantly
- Work on standard images formats, including TIF, BMP, JPG, PNG, and PSD
Autodesk SketchBook 2011 Pro – 1 User 732C1-A5A11B-1001 Graphic Design Software
Relied on by professionals, adored by everyone who loves to draw… SketchBook Pro translates sophisticated technology and professional functionality into a natural drawing experience; use it anywhere you would traditionally use paper and pen!
A Natural Sketching Experience
SketchBook Pro is, essentially, your virtual sketchbook. Designed specifically for pen-based interaction, transform your desktop computer, laptop, or Tablet PC into a digital sketch pad. The intuitive interface makes it easy to access a host of tools and state-of-the-art features, including pencils, markers, brushes, colors, guides, layers, and blending effects.
“It’s the fantastic responsiveness and clean interface that keep me coming back to Sketchbook Pro–but the way new enhancements extend the shape and textural capabilities, make it easier than ever to tailor it to your individual drawing and painting needs. I love this software.” — Nick Harris, Illustrator (UK)
Your Creative Process
SketchBook Pro fits in virtually any creative workflow; load and view images and photographs for reference or mark-up and annotations. SketchBook Pro lets you open and save images from a variety of image formats, including moving files directly in and out of Photoshop.
Your Tools
Whether you are designing your next masterpiece, story boarding a feature film, expressing your wildest ideas, or just plain doodling, SketchBook Pro is your ultimate digital sketchbook.
| Highlights |
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Freely express your ideas and unleash your creativity with SketchBook Pro.
| What’s new | |
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| New Tool bar for quick access | New Palette to store customized brushes |
| Import and export your own custom brush sets | Selection Enhancement
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Layer Enhancements
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Preferences
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Draw Modes to quickly capture basic shapes
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New brush parameters for customizing brush textures
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Image editing
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Text Layers for annotations and type
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List Price: $ 59.00
Price: $ 35.00
The best new thing in music,
The Writing’s on the Wall has thrown Destiny’s Child into stardom. Their last CD only sold 800,000 copies but this one has sold more than 5 times that amount and I’m about to tell you why the songs are responsible.
Track #2 (So Good)- Okay song. Not one of my favorites on the album.
Track #3 (Bills,Bills,Bills)- Their first single from this album. Great song. About how the men their with spend all their money and use them to look good, but give nothing in return. Close favorite. In fact, my #2.
Track #4(Confessions)- Possibly the only song where the four ladies did something wrong. About how they cheated on their mates and they’re confessing. Good song, but seems like it goes on for a long time.
Track #5 (Bug A Boo)- Great song. About how the men won’t leave them alone. Very fresh sound. It’s an R&B crossover to pop kinda song. My #3 favorite.
Track #8 (Where’d You Go)- This is a pretty good song. Kinda catchy but don’t play it too much. You can get tired of it easily.
Track #9 (Hey Ladies)- Really great song. Love the beat and the vocals. “Hey Ladies” is an upbeat song that can be danced to. Only bad thing is that the chrous seems like it goes on forever.
Track #10 (If You Leave)- One of the best songs on the CD. Features Next and shows off great vocals. Perhaps one of the best duets among groups I’ve heard in a while. This will most likely be a favorite among many. They should make it a single.
Track #11 (Jumpin)- Great dance song. Has that dance floor techno beat flavor.Currently Jumpin’ the charts. This, I have to say is tied for my favorite song with the next track.
Track #12 (Say My Name)- Was a big hit heard on radios and TVs every where. In this song they are telling the men if you aren’t cheating on me say my name/tell me you love me. Great song. My #1. I wouldn’t exactly call it a ballad because of the beats and vocal styles.
Every song on this CD is great and I’m telling you it is a must have. Don’t believe me? Buy it for yourself and listen. You be the judge.
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|So far their Destiny looks good …album is blazing!,
This album from destiny’s child is just blazing and if you don’t want to take my word for it just go out and get it. I never heard the whole of their last cd but I know that this is one of their best. Lyrics and beats especially is just tight. I don’t buy to many R+B cds but this one was too Hot not to listen to. The 2 lead singers did producing and writing and you can see it on this cd. The beats……….They will leave you in smoke. I seriously didn’t expect this to be that tight. They were really creative on this one with making up the commandments for love like, “Thou shalt not follow temptation”, and “Thou shalt not bug” at the beginning of each song. It was phat how they made up there voices in the beginning to sound like “the God father” and calling their fans the Don. My favorite tracks are: Jumpin Jumpin, Confessing, Bills bills bills, and the remix of it, Bugaboo, where did you go, say my name, stay and so good. Thats about the whole cd but that’s how good it is. Rodney Jerkins did a good job on the “say my name” track and he finally made a new sound thats different from all the other stuff he did like “The boy is mine”(brandy and monica) and “If you had my love”(Jennifer lopez. Next came in strong on this one too. Everything is tight and you can see they didn’t rush it like some artists are doing. If you are looking for a group with tight beats, and vocals then this is for you no doubt. I see sucess in in this groups destiny because they just get tighter and tighter everytime. I can’t believe they are only 18….but they r making moves. Get it!
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|The Writing’s on the Wall,
Intro: I actually like how they created that. It blended in really well with the mood and contrast of the cd. It told what the whole basis of the cd was about.
So Good: It one of those feel good songs. Think (for those who have Survivor) “Happy Face” in a spiteful, in-your-face type of groove.
Bills, Bills, Bills: Everyone has heard this song at least ONCE. Overall, great beat, lyrics carry out really well, catchy beat.
Confessions: One of the risque songs on the cd. Basically, the girl in the song get her boyfriend back by telling him that if he can play games, she can play games.
Bug-A-Boo: One of the more Pop-oriented, but at the same time has an R&B feel to it. In simple terms, this young lady who’s new boyfriend is constantly keeping contact 24-7 (stalking or smothering-whatever you prefer to call it)
Temptation: One of the greatest beats on the song. The beat can mesmorize you before the first verse hits. Nice, jazzy, slow, but sassy. The song is about the temptation a girl has to cheat on her boyfriend.
Now That She’s Gone: This song’s beat sounds a lot like another song, but I can’t really pin-point it exactly. One of my favorites (but I am a slow-song person, so don’t totally go on my word if you’re into hyper sounds on this one) The beat is nice. Very R&B. This song is about how a man wants to go back and forth between one girl and another girl.
Where’d You Go: The girls’ vocals are matched wonderfully. This song is about a girl asking where her boyfriend has been.
Hey Ladies: I’m not even going to beat around the bush on this one. It is just male bashing with a very good beat. That’s all.
If You Leave: The beat had to grow on me. As soon as it did, I appreciated it. Story is-she hates her boyfriend, he hates his girlfriend, what do they do? Do the only logical thing, run away together. (It took me a little while to understand why that solution made sense).
Jumpin’ Jumpin’: I have heard this beat from Nokia phones to pagers to everything else. Nice club beat. Kind of beat that makes it very, VERY hard for you not to move a part of your body to the beat. About clubbing.
Say My Name: This song has Rodney Jerkins all over it. It sounds like one of his signature beats. Liked the use of the strings in the beginning. This song everyone has heard so no need to say.
She Can’t Love You: I love this song. Another one of my favorites. Like the jazz background. It hits everyone of the girls’ voices. Kind of makes you feel you are in a jazz lounge while they are singing. This one is about how the girl can do alot better than the ex-boyfriends new girlfriend (think: plot to Mary J. Blige’s “I Can Love You”)
Stay: Another favorite. It is a very pretty song. It’s not one of those sorry songs, it’s quite sweet. The girl is asking the guy to stay with her until she is ready to take their love to the next level. (think: plot to Janet Jackson’s “Let’s Wait Awhile”)
Sweet Sixteen: Honestly, for me, if it wasn’t for the vocals, I wouldn’t like this song. The beat isn’t something I’m too used to, but after a few more listens, I was feeling it. This song is basically telling teens that you aren’t grown at 16, so don’t trip.
Amazing Grace: Great way to close out and introduce the groups vocal stability without music in the background. Shows exactly how harmonious the group really is.
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|The BEST Digital Sketchbook For Artists, Designers & Crafters!,
The Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011 is the best digital sketchpad I’ve ever used! I majored in art in high school and have always used art, crafts or designs in many of my jobs. I’ve designed t-shirts, done miniatures, sewn clothes for antique dolls, silkscreens for cloth patterns and general art work and photography. Once I owned a computer, I found many great photo programs over the years, but up until now, I really never found a great sketch or art program. I own Corel’s Painter, which is not only time consuming to learn the media applications, but it’s slow, misses strokes and has several bugs in it’s applications. Corel keeps giving me patches, but it has become tiresome to keep downloading patches all the time! I actually would rather do my art by hand than deal with all of Painter’s issues.
I’ve been using this Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011 every day, to see how smoothly it runs, and it not only runs smoothly, it’s unbelievably fast! I have a Windows XP, and it took only a few minutes to download this great program. Once downloaded, I skipped the directions, as I wanted to see how quickly and easily I could learn to use this program on my own. Talk about easy to learn- anyone from 5 to 95 could use this without reading a direction! I am truly amazed that I could draw a sketch, a complicated geometric design for a piece of dress fabric and a dress pattern all in one sitting! The sketchpad itself is uncluttered with a small corner interface control, that allows you to bring up the nicely small tools window, brushes window or colors window. There is a brush property circle that allows you to choose both the brush size and flow for coverage. You can place these windows anywhere out of your drawing area or keep them off the screen completely.
The Brushes window includes a nice array of media types: pencil, airbrush, marker, chisel tip pen, ballpoint pen, paintbrush, felt tip pen, smear, blur, sharpen (does a great outline), hard eraser, soft eraser, flood fill and flood fill for all visible layers. The Tools Bar window has undo, redo, select, lasso, crop, zoom, rotate, ruler, elipse, symmetry X (top and bottom), symmetry Y (side to side), free hand, line, rectangle, polyline, oval and layers. Those symmetry features made my geometrical fabric design take only minutes to complete! What a great feature! The colors window features a color wheel, where you can create any color imaginable, then save it in the blocks below it. For your image, it has image size or canvas size, crop, adjust, rotate, mirror canvas, flip canvas vertically, mirror layer, flip layer vertically and both symmetry X and Y. Your finished art will work on the standard image formats- TIF, BMP, JPG, PNG and PSD.
I wish I had this program years ago, before I wasted so much time, money and constant patching on Corel’s Painter! I’m just happy to have this Autodesk’s super fast and easy Sketchbook now! For anyone who just sketches or draws, the inexpensive price of this program will pay for itself on the money you’ll save on paper, pen, paints and inks! It’s a wonderful, fast and easy money saving way to do story boarding, concept sketches, illustrations, fabric designs, pattern designs and anything that you would normally use a sketchpad and your choice of media for! Artists, designers and crafters will love the professional results they’ll get with this BEST digital Sketchbook that I’ve ever used!
(With my review, I’ve included 3 images. If you don’t see them on the top of this page in Images, you can find them by clicking on my name, then going to My Profile-Customer Images. The first image is of my computer screen, so you can see the corner interface control called the lagoon, which can be moved side to side or removed completely when sketching. You will also see the great moveable tool bar, brush window and color window- which you can move these three anywhere on the screen or remove, when sketching. It’s simplistic screen design needs no directions! I made a City Skyline In Fall sketch in 5 minutes using the paintbrush and air brush along with the freehand, line and rectangle tools and spent another 5 minutes coloring it.
The second image I made in 20 minutes for a fabric print design using the symmetry tools. I used both symmetry tools X and Y along with flood fill, airbrush and paintbrush. The third image took me the longest time to create- 35 minutes, due to more detailed floral designs I wanted to create for a scarf print. I again used both symmetry tools X and Y along with flood fill, airbrush, paintbrush and the felt tip pen.
The fabric designs that used to take me endless hours by hand to create, now takes me a mere 20 to 40 minutes with these great symmetry tools! For fast painting, the airbrush and flood fill take seconds to use! The flood fill, which is a paint bucket, can be used to cover an entire area, or you will quickly learn like I did that you can also use…
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|Excellent drawing/illustration tool for all skill levels,
AutoDesk SketchBook Pro 2011 is a drawing and sketching application designed for creatively-minded people. For those with artistic ability, SketchBook Pro is a powerful and productive tool, but for those with less talent it is a tool that allows even the most unskilled user to produce results with a small learning curve.
Installation is a painless and effortless undertaking. I was able to install the application with no issues at all and had a working installation in 5-10 minutes.
When Sketchbook Pro opens, rather than fill the screen with bunches of toolbars, widgets and other clutter, the user is greeted with a wide-open canvas, the “lagoon” toolbar in the lower left of the screen and a tool palette. The tool palette is easy enough to close and retrieve, but one thing that disappoints me is that is it not dockable. It is well-designed for docking and that it is either floating or off with no other options is a design decision with which I disagree. Hopefully AutoDesk will reconsider this and will change this in future releases.
For the uninitiated the lagoon is an arched toolbar that is parked in one corner of the screen and provides access to various tools and functions such as a color wheel, brush palette and more. It can be moved to either the lower left or lower right, and it can also be used to completely remove the menu bar from the top of the screen if desired. To pick a tool from the lagoon, the user clicks and holds on a lagoon icon, which opens a radial menu of icons to which the user drags the mouse to select the desired choice. This is a very different way of working and requires a little getting used to it, but it becomes second nature after using it for a while.
I observed that when the menu is removed from the canvas via the lagoon, SketchBook Pro inserts a wide band of unusable area across the bottom of the screen, and as a result there was no real space gain. The one advantage I found in this is that I can park the floating toolbar window in this unusable area which got it more out of the way, but otherwise I do not understand why the application works in this manner. If the idea was to give a maximum of workable space, it doesn’t (at least, not directly).
SketchBook Pro is not the most advanced or powerful drawing program out there but it is packed with a surprising amount of features and tools to make even people with limited artistic talent productive. It has a variety of pens and brushes and each of these can be tweaked for size and intensity (as well as color, of course), but there’s a lot more than just drawing implements. The ruler is an especially useful tool that I have not encountered in other applications, at least in the same way SketchBook Pro’s works. It is more of a straight-edge tool rather than a ruler and allows the artist to make straight, precise lines with no worry of slipping or overshooting the distance. My favorite set of tools in the tool box is the reflectivity (symmetry) options, that create mirror images of what you draw as you’re drawing. This can be a time saver.
The help system is top-notch and is arguably the best help system I have seen with an application of any type. It is a browser-based help system, very easy to follow and very well-designed with lots of eye appeal. Searching and finding information is straightforward and easy, and the overall system is very responsive.
AutoDesk has done a nice job with SketchBook Pro 2011. It is powerful and very easy to use and is well suited for the casual doodler as well as professional artists. There are a couple of design decisions in the interface that are puzzling but these are matters of personal taste, and overall the clean, uncluttered canvas gives the artist more room in which to work than most other applications of this type. At the price point, SketchBook Pro 2011 is an excellent application for drawing and sketching and is worth serious consideration if you’re looking for such an application.
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|Reasons to Buy This Even if You Already Have Photoshop or Painter,
I put off trying this product for a long time since I already had Photoshop and Painter. I didn’t see the need to purchase another product when I already had the two most expensive drawing/painting programs available. About six months ago I downloaded the trial version of Sketchbook Pro 2010 and fell in love with it! This new version adds some nice features (like layer blending modes) that enhance the software even more.
I still use Photoshop and Painter to complete my digital works–but I often start them in Sketchbook because I find it provides the closest sensation to drawing with traditional pencil and paper of any digital art program currently available.
The pencil feature creates lines that are almost identical to the lines you would get with a regular pencil. If you have a pressure sensitive laptop or monitor (Wacom Cintiq) then the experience is almost identical to using a pencil on paper! Download the free trial version and try it out first to see what I mean.
The interface is very basic and easy to use. One great advantage of this program over Photoshop or Painter is that the majority of the screen is available for drawing–it is not cluttered up with menu bars and palettes! I find this a huge plus when I am drawing on my pressure sensitive laptop that only has a 12 inch screen. Space is less of an issue with my 22″ Cintiq.
I’ve seen some very impressive works that have been totally created in SketchBook but I still use Photoshop and Painter to finish my drawings/paintings because these programs have advanced features that SketchBook Pro doesn’t have (masks, adjustment layers, etc.).
Bottom line: When it comes to pure sketching–this software is my first choice! Combined with a pressure sensitive laptop or monitor–it doesn’t get any more natural feeling than this!
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