Bend it, bend it, just a little bit

Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was a doped up laid-back art student, we had an enormous piece of equipment in the studio that, once you were stood on a box and drew the curtains around you, enabled you to tweak the proportions of any part of your artwork until you were happy with the result. How we'd have loved to be able to save and print the final result! But no, we had to trace it from the flat screen.

So why, several centuries later, can't I do the same thing on a computer? It's not a complicated procedure so it's obvious the programmer would have installed the facility to isolate any part of the artwork and enbiggify, ensmallify, or in any other fashion manipulate the image. Put the cursor on a point and pull it to distort it. Basic stuff. So why the wombat didn't he make it easy to find? I've worked out how to do things on Publisher which can't be done on Illustrator, and vice versa. I can't believe I have to skip back and forth from program to program to do a simple task that would take 10 minutes with a process camera, a pencil and piece of paper.

Aaaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh!