Cartooning & illustration sketch blog with tips and tutorials.
I thought global colors in Illustrator were something everybody knew about, but perhaps not. Doesn’t anyone read the manuals for their software?
James Dempsey over at The Graphic Mac just posted a brief overview of the global process color swatches in Adobe Illustrator.
Update to my previous post about the bug in Photoshop CS3 and other Adobe CS3 apps under Mac OS X 10.5.3 where saving a file to a networked drive will result in a corrupt file. Supposedly this has been fixed under the just-released OS X 10.5.4 update.
Even more confirmation comes from the fact that it was directly referenced by Apple as one of the fixes in this update.
Cartoonist Mike Foran has a couple of cool number 2 pencil Photoshop brushes - free to download - that I stumbled across the other day. For some time now I have been on the casual lookout for a Photoshop brush that mimicked a regular-ol’ number 2 pencil. Seems Foran was on that line of thought as well.
Foran’s brush has a nice line quality, varied from thick to thin based on your Wacom tablet pressure, and has a slight angle similar to a flat-worn pencil tip.
The brush also has a nice light feel at light pressure, and darkens quickly with pressure added. The texture and look of the brush marks/pencil lines is perfect.
This Animator’s Survival Kit DVD set from Oscar-winning animator Richard Willams looks like a great resource for those animators out there. Personally, I do not have the patience for animation, but it’s fascinating to me.
This DVD set is a companion to Williams’ highly-rated Animator’s Survival Kit book. The site doesn’t seem to indicate if the book is included with the DVD set, but it seems not to be.
Richard Williams was awarded two Oscars for the animation on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit“. He directed and designed Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman and all the new characters for the Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg production.
The set isn’t cheap at £634.04 (or about $1,252.42 for us U.S. folks as of the date of this post).
I just came across a serious bug in Photoshop CS3 under Mac OS X 10.5.3 (the newest version as of this post).
Seems saving a file to a networked drive will result in a corrupt file. I found this out the hard way, unfortunately.
Adobe and Apple are aware of this bug, and John Nack over at his Adobe blog is under the impression that this will be fixed in the next Mac OS X update. This seems to imply that the issue is with 10.5, but not necessarily I suppose. Adobe has posted a TechNote on the issue as well.
I recently completed a concert poster design featuring a fez-wearing cartoon genie mascot character for Nashville, Tennessee roots-rock jam band Vinyl Soup.
I have been working with guitarist Andrew Hooker for some time now with t-shirt designs, a logo redesign, concert posters and other promotional materials for the band.
Recent gig poster design work for Vinyl Soup had started to go down a path of design-only work. Andrew initially contacted me for a t-shirt design for the band, and his initial interest was in my cartooning/illustration work.
Starting out on concepts for this poster, I was again working on a solely design-oriented approach, and before I got too far along I dropped Andrew an email to see if going back to an illustrative style would be cool with him. It most certainly was, so I set about to work up a theme for the poster.
SneakPeek Pro is a QuickLook plugin fro Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). In a nutshell, it extends file previews in both QuickLook and the Finder to previously unsupported file types such as Adobe Illustrator .ai files and EPS files.
If you aren’t familiar with QuickLook, it’s a pretty awesome new feature of 10.5 which allows you to quickly preview a good number of core file types — PDF, JPG, PSD, Word docs, movies, text files and more — without actually opening an application. One just needs to tap the spacebar with a file highlighted in the Finder, and a floating bezel-type window opens up with the full image, document or movie. Even works with multi-page documents as well. It’s just plain awesome.
Continue reading 'Illustrator File Previews: SneakPeek Pro QuickLook Plugin For Mac OS X'OS X’
Jumpcut is a very handy clipboard extender for Mac OS X. What Jumpcut does is remember a user-specified number of text items copied to the clipboard, and allows one to select from them when pasting.
The standard OS X clipboard allows the user to paste only the last-copied item. Jumpcut just keeps track of everything you have copied using the Command (⌘) -C shortcut or the Edit -> Copy menu item.
Continue reading 'Jumpcut: Free OS X Clipboard History Utility'OS X Clipboard History Utility’
A rough sketch of a cartoon pinup girl with American flag & mobile phone. This was drawn for a project I am currently working on for a client, updating their existing mascot character art to be used with the company logo and other branding. It was rejected due to not being the kind of pose the client wanted for the woman.
She has potential, but there are a few things proportion-wise that I think need to be reworked, particularly with her face — the lips are a bit low on the head, and the eyes are a bit off. These are all things that would have been tweaked in the revision stage.
At this point I wanted to get the general idea over to the client for feedback before I went too far, and in this case it was the smart thing to do since I will need to start from scratch with her.
Continue reading 'Cartoon Pinup Girl With American Flag Sketch'
Who doesn’t remember those Wacky Packages collectible trading cards of cartoon product parodies growing up as a kid in the ’70’s? Well, I guess people that didn’t grow up in the ’70’s…
Anyways, there seems to be a new Wacky Packages 35th anniversary retrospective book available now (even though Amazon’s release date reads June 1, 2008…).
Bad Behavior has blocked 621 access attempts in the last 7 days.
