Hardware porn redux

A question was posted here, and then apparently deleted by the poster, asking whether my hardware upgrade will increase the likelihood I will finish a story. I think it's a good question, so I'm going to answer it, anyway.

As I look back on it, it seems like the most productive period of my catfight art career was in the early to mid-nineties. At that point, I was working on a 486/33 PC clone with a dim, crappy 14-inch CRT monitor. I mean this thing got so dim I had to turn out the lights to see anything. But I got stuff done.

I have two friends who are fine artists. They are both well-known in my community, and are shown in high-end galleries. They both work on large canvases – 36 inches or wider. And they both just prop their paintings on the floor or on a tabletop to work on them. No huge oak easels, no fine hardwood palettes. One mixes his paint on tinfoil.

I remember seeing a clip from a documentary on the legendary MAD Magazine cartoonist, Mort Drucker. Drucker sits at his kitchen table to draw, working with Bristol board taped to an old drawing board.

I like having kickass hardware. It certainly makes the more mundane aspects of artwork easier, and I'm in favor of anything that reduces the overhead of small, repetitive tasks, such as trying to find a particular child window in a maze of palettes in Painter or Photoshop.

But big iron doesn't automatically equate to better work, or more work. If I want to be more productive, the main thing I need to improve is not my system, but myself.