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...
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...
