Plaidophile

Since I'm in a break between comics, and I've been completely redoing my MacBook because of upgrading its hard drive and adding a dedicated NAS to my network and so on, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Photoshop CS5. Which is, frankly, terrible in how slow and laggy it is.

I've owned a copy of Pixelmator for years, and they've improved it immensely over that time, but there are still a few glaring deficiencies in the UI. They've finally gotten the brushes to work really well, but now I'm finding that all tools are set to use the same brush all the time - including the eraser, which is always sized exactly the same as the brush tool. Which makes drawing much more of a chore than it should be.

So, once again I'm looking at alternate drawing apps. I have VectorDesigner as well, but vector drawing has never really agreed with me for a number of reasons (usually tablet pressure support is rudimentary or even nonexistent, and I also like being able to screw around with things at the raster level which I find to be much more flexible, even with its "inaccuracy"). This also pretty much rules out Inkscape, although I might give it a try again anyway.

GIMP on OSX is of course a joke (the various native efforts are in perpetually primitive states, and the X11 version doesn't support tablet pressure since X11 on OSX doesn't support much of XInput).

Basically, I need a drawing app with the following features:

• Runs on OSX
• A drawing/sketching-friendly workflow
• Tablet support (pressure, subpixel brush positioning)
• Layers (ideally with groups, and group blend modes)
• Magic wand selection and filling, as well as fast selection refinement (expand and contract at least, ideally with fast keyboard access)
• Is affordable and I can justify paying for it with the understanding that I'm an amateur who likes drawing for fun and doesn't intend to ever make money on this

There's a lot of free/cheap drawing apps out there, but most of them have critical flaws that make them pretty much not worth working with. It seems like there's a whole bunch of niche apps which work pretty well for their niche, and then Photoshop is what everyone else turns to, ignoring that it's slow, bloated, and massively overpriced for just a drawing app...

Today I was at the Alameda Antiques Fair, and came across what purported to be an original animation cel from the Star Trek: TAS episode Yesteryear. I of course bought it (after failing to convince Mark that he should), and then after framing and hanging it, I decided to watch the episode it supposedly came from.

Thanks again for submitting your work for the Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery.

I’m pleased to say that your work has been selected for inclusion in our exhibition, and will be featured in the Virtual Gallery along with a wide array of webcomics from around the globe. This historic exhibition will include over 100 artists, making this one of the largest exhibitions in the Cartoon Art Museum’s 24-year history, and we’re thankful for your participation.

I am pleased as well! My stuff will be in a museum! I think this is only the second time this has happened.

Here's a full press release of the exhibit, and also you can read more about the goings-on at the Cartoon Art Museum on their LiveJournal.

I will have to finally go to CAM and maybe even meet Shaenon and Andrew in person!

After a conversation with Mark the other night, I think I have figured out what differentiates a "cartoon animal" from a "furry."

The big deciding factor appears to be: if a character is furred and also has human-like hair, they are furry. Otherwise they are a cartoon animal.

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Dear furry artists who insist on drawing platypi:

• They are not birds. The "duck" bill is an example of convergent evolution. They do not have feathers. They are not in any way "avian."
• Their eggs are soft-shelled and leathery like a snake's, not hard like a chicken's.
• The tail is shaped somewhat like a beaver's, but it's not actually a beaver tail (to start with, it's furred); it's a rudder and a fat reserve, not a piece of construction equipment. This also does not mean that they are in any other way like a beaver. In particular they don't have buckteeth, or in fact teeth at all. Moreover, this means that their tails are not like that of the following species:
  • Fox
  • Wolf
  • Squirrel
  • Dinosaur
  • Whatever the hell it is has long flowing locks of hair instead of a tail
• They do not have breasts or nipples. They secrete milk directly through the skin. I suppose you could take some artistic license and make them a bit curvy but they still shouldn't have gigantic nipples with areolae.
• Being monotremes (which literally means "one hole"), they have a cloaca, which the penis or vagina is hidden in. A hermaphroditic platypus would probably look just like a male platypus. They would not let it all "hang out."
• Also, if you really must insist on drawing one in a state of arousal, the penis has four heads on it.

From a spam email (all the spam parts removed). All below the cut.

So about a year ago I bought a bunch of different Wacom stylus nibs: some more of the standard acrylic ones, some of the spring-loaded "stroke" ones, and some of the compressed felt ones. By now I've actually used all three kinds regularly, so I'd might as well share some thoughts.

As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my better photos to my deviantART account and enrolled them (as well as some of my drawings) in the prints program. Are there any other no-effort artwork-selling things I should use as well? How is Flickr's "make stuff" thing for that? Should I even bother?

Oh, and uh, any specific other things I should make available as prints?

Okay, I learned that Pixelmator will have tablet support VERY SOON (on their Twitter page they announced that they finished implementing it about 11 hours ago, so of course the next release will really have it like they sorta-promised on their forums). So I decided to give it another shot, bearing in mind that tablet support would be coming.

It's pretty close to decent, though I still have a few complaints with it. Nothing that'll prevent me from buying it when 1.1 comes out, but there are many things I'd like to see them fix in the (preferably near) future:

So, for the last several years I've been using Photoshop 7 to draw my comics. Unfortunately, I've read that Photoshop 7 doesn't run under OSX 10.5 (which I really want to upgrade to), but I'm not going to spend the $oodles to upgrade to CS3 (the price seems to go up every week... it's $1000 now!). I'm having a hell of a time finding a drawing app which fits my needs without being an expensive high-end photo-editing suite, though. And yes, I've tried a lot of them.

I may have played a bit too much Paper Mario recently.

I finally got around to going through my writing and deciding which bits should go into the writing section. I also went and reformatted it all for HTML, but there might be some oddness to some things (since I used txt2html for most of it).

I also put in a few older images into the web art section.

I think it's finally time to nuke the old site from orbit.