(Illustration by Paul Fricke/Blue Moon Studios. All rights reserved.) It's my pleasure to welcome another Minnesota illustrator to the blogosphere! My friend and fellow illustrator Paul Fricke (owner of Blue Moon Studios) has just launched a spanky new version of his website--complete with a daily blog. Paul has been freelancing for over twenty years now. He has a background...
I've had the privilege of being a member of the National Cartoonists Society for about five years now. Since I live in Minneapolis I belong to the North Central Chapter. Most of the NCS chapters are centered on the coasts, where you can find a high concentration of cartoonists in a relatively small geographical area. Since this is the...
For last Saturday's episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! I had the privilege of not only designing the misc. characters but also most of the props (over two dozen!) It was a lot of work for one episode but also a ton of fun. Here's a sampling: (All artwork is © copyright Big Idea. All rights reserved.) This water pump is not really a...
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.
