Interview with Griatch, Part I

Griatch is a GimpTalk forum administrator, and has written many tutorials which are hosted on GimpTalk, including a beginner’s GIMP tutorial and a tutorial which covers setting up GIMP for artistic work. Griatch’s DeviantArt gallery can be found at http://www.griatch-art.deviantart.com/.

OpenArtBox: If you could, please give a little background information about yourself.

Griatch: I, Griatch, am Swedish. Professionally I am a scientist, an astrophysicist working on planet formation computer simulations. Doing art is just one of my many hobbies. As a programmer, one of my side projects is being the lead maintainer for the open-source Evennia game server package. I'm also creating music on my keyboard and writing short stories. Art-wise I do digital painting, almost exclusively things out of my own imagination. Examples can be found in my DA gallery here and on YouTube. I'm also dabbling in making comics. Being active in the open-source art community on GimpTalk.com (where I am an administrator) and other similar sites for many years now, I have also created many tutorials on using open-source software.

OpenArtBox: What operating system do you use? If you use Linux, which distribution do you use? In what ways do you feel that your operating system/Linux distribution of choice meets your needs as an artist/designer especially well?

Griatch: I am a Linux user, both at work and for private use. At work I use Debian stable and at home I use a distribution called aptosid, which is basically Debian sid (unstable), but with a thin layer of review in front of it to make it stable to use while still being able to use the bleeding-edge software.

Linux has excellent support for Wacom graphics tablets, and the range of programs available is more than adequate for most levels of artistic users, including professionals (of which I know quite a few that do perfectly well using free software).

OpenArtBox: Which open source art/design software packages do you
use? What, in particular, do you do with them?

Griatch: The nature of astronomy is that essentially all software is custom-built for very specialized equipment by the scientists themselves, and this meant open-source was a defacto standard among astronomers long before anyone had actually coined the term. There is a long tradition of open-source within many scientific fields I think. It simply helps to speed development and favours the scientific review if others can use your codes, check what you did in detail and verify your results.  (Response continued in Part II...)