As promised, here's some of the character design sketches I did for last Saturday's episode of 3-2-1 Penguins!: (All artwork is © copyright Big Idea. All rights reserved.) In this episode, the Penguins visited a planet inhabited by lawn flamingos and garden gnomes who were fighting each other for control of the water supply (the episode was about learning to share)....
Another Episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! airs tomorrow morning on NBC. For this particular episode I designed not just the alien characters but also the various props and gadgets. I think I did more work on this episode than on any other episode during the season. And as always, it was a blast. On Monday, after the episode has aired, I'll post...
My portable "sketchbook" Cintiq arrived on Tuesday. After my first few hours with it, here are my initial impressions:
Beauty and Brawn. Like other Cintiq's, this is a quality product with an elegant design. It's thin but sturdy (although a tad heavier than I thought it would be). You almost think that you could knock it off a table top without doing any damage...although I wouldn't recommend trying.
Drawing on it feels smooth and natural, just like a regular Cintiq.
Screen Specs. The high-resolution screen displays a crisp image with rich color. It has a wider viewing angle than my laptop screen, which means I can tilt it at different angles and the color shifts just slightly, if at all. Laptop screens are notorious for their shifting color, so this was a pleasant surprise.
If you are a stickler for color, you may not like the Cintiq's default color settings. I've never been able to get my desktop Cintiq to be quite as precise in its color calibration as, say, an Apple cinema display, and my guess is the sketchbook Cintiq also can't be fine-tuned as precisely as some would like. Although to be fair I haven't done much research into how to calibrate the new Cintiq. But for general purpose cartooning and illustration the color is still very good.
I almost forgot to post this...
It's crunch time on 3-2-1 Penguins!, and after several months of work it looks like this week I will finally wrap up my character designs for the last episode of the season. It's been an absolute blast, and one of the most enjoyable projects I've worked on in a long time. But also one of the most time-consuming. I didn't...
If you do a lot of graphic's work with your computer, like me you can easilly sprinkle your hard drive with dozens of applications and drivers. The recent release of Leopard (Apple's new opearting system) got me wondering about all the junk on my computer and how much of it is really up to date. Obviously you want your computer to...
