Gerry Hattrick

Posts by Gerry Hattrick

• 50 Easy Things to Draw When You Have No Idea What to Draw

  Fifty drawing prompts sorted by how much effort you have available, from thirty seconds to twenty minutes. No skill required and no supplies beyond something to draw with.

• MS Paint Alternatives: What to Use When You Miss the Old One

  Microsoft Paint didn't disappear, it grew layers, background removal, and an AI image generator. If you miss the old low-stakes version, here's what to use instead on PC, Mac, and iPad.

• Why the Best Drawing App Has the Fewest Features

  Most "best drawing app" lists rank software by feature count. Here's the case for the opposite, plus an honest guide to when you actually need the powerful tool and when it's the thing stopping you from drawing.

• How to Tell What a Free Drawing App Actually Costs You

  "Free" drawing apps usually mean ads, a paywalled subscription, data collection, or generative features bolted on. Here's what each popular app actually does, checked.

• 5 Process Art Projects for Kids 5 and Under

  Five low-prep art activities for toddlers and preschoolers, with age guidance, mess levels, and setup times. Built around process, not results, the point is the doing.

• How to Draw a Recipe (That Someone Can Actually Cook From)

  Illustrated recipes fit on one page, read in seconds, and look great on a fridge. Most are also impossible to cook from. Here's how to draw one that works.

• What Is Getadoodle? The Social Drawing App Where Real People Draw and Get Paid

  Getadoodle is a social drawing app where real people draw, share, and commission each other directly. Here's what it is, how it works, and how to get started.

• How to Commission a Custom Pet Portrait (and Why the Bad Ones Are Better)

  What a custom pet portrait costs, how long it takes, what photo to send, and why a slightly wrong drawing of your dog beats a photorealistic one.

• Personalized Gift Ideas That Aren't Mugs

  Custom gifts that aren't engraved keyrings, commissioned art, handmade goods, experiences, and things you can make yourself. Sorted by budget and how long they take.

• How to Get a Custom Profile Picture Made

  What a commissioned pfp costs, what to ask for, what size it needs to be, and why a hand-drawn one reads better at 40 pixels than anything generated.

• How to Make Money From Your Art Without Building a Business

  Most advice on monetizing art assumes you'll build an audience first. Here are the routes that don't, what each one really pays, and how long it takes before anything happens.

• The Gallery Takes Half

  A gallery typically takes 50% of the sale price. Here's what that buys an artist, when it's worth it, and what selling directly costs instead, with the numbers stated plainly.

• Not Scary, Just Weird: 4 Free Printable Halloween Masks

  Four free printable Halloween masks you can download and print on 8.5" x 11" paper in about four minutes. No blood, no fangs, just weird little faces. Cut lines included.

• The 30-Day Bad Drawing Challenge

  Thirty daily drawing prompts, five minutes each, designed for people who aren't good at drawing. Full prompt list, printable calendar, and no requirement to finish.

• We Want to Text 300 People's Partners an AI Love Poem. What Do You Think Happens?

  Would your partner rather get a beautifully written AI love poem or a lopsided doodle of a heart with a typo? We're going to find out. Predict the result before we run it.

• The Luxury of Less

  Quartz was cheaper and more accurate, and mechanical watches became a luxury anyway. Vinyl lost to streaming and came back. Here's the pattern, and what it predicts about handmade art.

• The Wobble Is the Point

  Every tool in digital art exists to remove the shake from your line. Here's the case that the shake was the content, and the art history that got there a century ago.

• Why Every App Feels the Same Now

  Every app converged on the same design: infinite scroll, engagement optimization, AI in the middle of everything. Here's why it happened, and what a deliberately un-optimized app looks like instead.

• You Can't Optimize a Scribble

  Online writing has been shaped by SEO, engagement metrics, and now generation. Drawing has been left largely alone, not out of virtue, but because a scribble has no optimization gradient.

• The Luxury of Low-Tech: Put a Bad Drawing in an Expensive Frame

  A sheet of printer paper with a crude cat drawing on it, in a heavy frame, on a white wall. Why the contrast works, and how to commission and frame one.

• The Napkin Test, and When It Lies to You

  "If you can't sketch it, it isn't worth making" is a useful heuristic and a false rule. Here's which ideas the napkin test catches, and which ones it destroys.

• Creator Burnout Is a Business Model Problem

  Subscriptions aren't broken, they're demanding. Most full-time creators now run two or three revenue models at once. Here's the case for adding a low-overhead layer that doesn't need a content calendar.

• How Do You Prove a Human Made It?

  As generated images become indistinguishable from made ones, "a person made this" needs evidence. Here's what actually exists to prove it, what each approach can and can't do.