Author: Cedric

cintiq-sketchbook.jpg 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.

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...

The Christmas season is upon us. In America, as the saying goes, there's pressure to buy stuff we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even like. But Christmas can also be a time of genuine, heartfelt giving to those truly in need. After all, Christmas is a day to commemorate the generous gift God gave...

Continuing yesterday's post on tips for pricing your freelance services.... 7. Talk about money at the very beginning. You may be tempted to put off talking about money, perhaps with hopes that the client will eventually bring it up or that you can just figure out a price when the project is over. This is a huge mistake, and very unprofessional. The sooner you can negotiate a price, the better. The worst thing you can do is keep a client guessing about what the project will cost them. Discussing the price up front will help you to appear more confident and professional, it will keep you from potentially wasting valuable time on a dead-end project, and it will help you weed out clients who have tiny budgets or who simply want to take advantage of you. Under no circumstances should you begin doing work without having first negotiated a price.