Tablet FTW

Recently I purchased a new tablet because I heard about a nice little app called Procreate.

Unfortunately I had to purchase an iPad 4 because it was only available in iOS.

You see, I would have much rather gotten an android tablet, such as the Nexus 10, if only because I've already invested in quite a few Android apps.  I also like that there is quite a bit more freedom in Android.

The iPad does have a really good contrast ratio though and that makes it good for this sort of thing. Though not nearly as good as a decently calibrated monitor.

At first I was worried that I wouldn't make much use of it, but fortunately, I now think it was one of the best purchases I've made in a long time.


Because now I can draw anywhere, and draw the way I want to!

Here are some quick sketches done to get a sense of the whole thing.


I did use some other apps as well.  I find that I prefer roughing things out in Brushes or Sketchbook Mobile. So I have been using those apps a lot too.

2013 - This Time I'm Going To Do It My Way

That was a bit of a lengthy holiday I just had. It's now a new year and I am very hungry to get back at this art thing, and especially Who Needs the Moon.

For quite some time now I have been working pretty exclusively with MyPaint. However, I have been looking at the work of others and wondering how to achieve some of the things that they have done.  There are limitations to what the MyPaint brushes can do at this point.

MyPaint is amazing, but it does lack a lot of the functionality of Photoshop.  But then I did recall that I was using the Gimp for image based brushes before I moved on to MyPaint.  So I started fooling again with the Gimp's painting features, which by the way, would be a hell of a lot better if the application recognized my Monoprice tablet.

I was thinking of book cover concepts and came up with this.

And here are the results, after brainstorming the forested world of Duskland. Where some day my character Lampy will adventure in.

I hope you like it.  Happy New Year.

Dropbox adds functionality...

Things always happen this way.

I joined comicfury.com for a free way to post my book online, and it works well, if maybe it feels a little clunky to me as an end user.

It provides some limited statistics, which is good, because I've been able to see how much traffic has been going there to read the book.  But I think the layout is awkward for the reader, and there are other little things that could use some work.  But there is a community there.

But, originally I just wanted to post it directly to my blog and let people view it from here.  That way, I still have basic statistics, and all the traffic goes through here always.  So, I've been pretty torn about the whole thing, and now even more so.

On December 5th I received an email from the dropbox team to let me know that they have made viewing images much easier through dropbox.

What they've done is nice and simple and it uses a decent image viewing slideshow that is perfect for what I want.  It provides a good "table of contents" page that allows the user to close the existing image and select wherever in the story they want to go to or go back to.

So I've uploaded the first set of images there and I think I will be sharing the link with readers in this way from now on.

EDIT:
I have since removed the images from dropbox as of today March 13th 2013.