Sometimes you find something very unexpected on the net. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I found it now, but somewhere in my random wanderings on the net, I came across a link to Expression 3 — a vector drawing application developed by Creature House, which has now been bought by Microsoft. It's a full application, with a lot of unique and interesting features, and yet you can download it for free. I needed to produce a new logo for the hubby's art site, which I'm in the process of redesigning. I wanted to have an image of a brush in the logo, but — since Mr. Bsag is a real artist — all his brushes are chewed, battered and paint splattered, and not terribly photogenic. So I wanted to draw a brush instead.

The Bezier Pen and I are not the best of friends. Every attempt I've made to get to grips with it, and resulting in much wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part. However, Expression has a much more intuitive tool called the B-spline^1^, which I found quite managable. Anyway, the result of my tinkering about was the new logo above. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm quite proud of it. And even more impressed by Expression.

^1^ It's perfectly possible that Illustrator has a B-spline tool too, and I've never found it. But Illustrator costs serious money, and is glacially slow on my machine.