As an artist who grew up and began his professional life in the era before computers  I made the transition to digital art fairly smoothly. "Photoshop" became my program of choice as opposed to the more technically involved "Illustrator". One feature of PS that really helped me along was the ability to change the hot keys to suit my needs. While my right hand guides the digital brush over the drawing tablet my left hand deftly changes the brush shape, size, colour and texture without me  looking at the keyboard; much like touch typing. I can do this because I have  changed the default hot keys to a system which makes better sense to me. You can change the hot keys by going to Edit-Keyboard Shortcuts or Edit-Menus. My "Home Position" is with my left pinky on the N key, my ring finger on the M key, my middle finger on the < key and my index finger on the > key.  This leaves my thumb free to bounce between the alt and ctrl keys below. The N key is "eraser" and the M key is "brush". The < and > keys control the tip sizes of those tools. That's all for today.  In my next blog I'll outline all the rest of the tools and menu controls I have set up. See you then. 

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