One step closer to finished with Dylan's farewell pages

Almost done with these pages… I have to work in the dialog balloons and that will be tricky — I didn’t lay them out in advance for any of the pages. I was winging it like a cocky rookie. I promise myself that I will lay out the dialog balloons for my next book before I do the paintings. Damn! I’m a slow learner.

Today will go down in history as the first time I’ve taken a picture with a film camera since 2015, seven years ago. Rather than use a fancy camera, I used an Ilford Sprite II, an all plastic point and shoot camera. It was fun. I’m going to carry a camera with me whenever I go out of the house.

The Agony of Buying a 40-year old Camera on Ebay

So many choices, so many ways to be disappointed, so many risks.

I couldn’t focus on anything but cameras today. Cameras and film scanners. Then I started lurking around Ebay. I’m a camera addict, and Ebay is my dealer.

Despite my trepidation about buying a used camera on Ebay, I’ve bought three working cameras in the last 7 years — a big Polaroid camera for which film is no longer made, a Nikon F3, and an 80-year old Rolleiflex, which works like a charm. Now I want a little Rollei 35 to carry with me while I’m out and about. I have other cameras, but they’re alarmingly huge and conspicuous and I want to be discrete as a mouse, just going here and there without being given away by a foot-long lens sticking out from my jacket.

Setting up Clip Studio Paint on my Mac

Testing Clip Studio Paint on my Mac.

I want to do more work on my iPad and iMac. Although I’m happy when working with Windows, just moving an image from the iPad to the Windows machine is a pain. Understand, I have a 2017 iMac with an awesome 27-inch screen to work with. It may be slightly slower than my PC, but I can airdrop images to it, which saves me the time that I would spend uploading an image to iCloud, then downloading it to my PC. In other words, the simpler workflow saves me time and lowers the aggravation level, which makes me a happier, though struggline, novice writer.

Chore Day, March 19 -- A Day of Spinning My Wheels

Besides the usual chores, which I won’t bother to mention, I spent many hours trying to get my Wacom Intuos Pro L working on my Mac. This giant tablet is my go-to tablet when I’m not using my Cintiq. It works perfectly on my Windows machine, but, alas, I can’t get it working on my Mac. The only reason I’m fretting about this is that I want to try Art Studio Pro on my Mac. It’s an awesome app on my iPad — I’m wondering if the magic will carry over to the desktop. I’m also wondering if the developers at Lucky Clan are putting as much effort into the desktop as the put into marvelous iPad app. By the way, the desktop version costs just $20.

If I can’t get the Intuos working, I’ll hook my Cintiq up to the Mac. It works flawlessly — at least it did several year ago.

Computer Hacking Day, BIOS, BIOS, BIOS

My 2013 Thinkpad needed a new battery. Lenovo doesn’t sell batteries for my laptop, so I got a clone. When I installed the non-genuine battery and booted the computer, a warning flashed on the screen: That’s not a genuine Lenovo battery. We won’t charge it. Buy a real battery from us.” The warning didn’t mention that Lenovo currently doesn’t have that battery in stock.

After a little searching, I found that Lenovo’s arm-twisting has been going on for years, and others have found a way to use clone batteries. I eventually found the code needed to patch the kernel and turn off the Lenovo code that detects non-Lenovo batteries. The gory details are too technical to go into. I’ll just say that it takes about 15 minutes to fix this pain.

While I was solving this problem, I installed Ubuntu Linux on the Thinkpad, and I’ve got my Wacom gear working on it with Krita, Gimp, and Inkscape. Speaking of Wacom, I’m Wacom-rich. I have two Wacom tablets, a Wacom One Pen Display, and a Cintiq 22, plus three styluses and one Artist stylus. Wacom gear last forever — my oldest tablet is 15-years old.

A Lazy Sunday...for a change

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Thinking of Spring, 2022

Once again my carefully crafted text was deleted by Squarespace. That sucks. This picture will donate a thousand words to make up for the loss.

Page 49, Inked, and Flatted at Last

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Today I wrapped up the inking and flatting for page 49. Tomorrow I’ll add shadows and I’ll give the volcano demon some proper tabby cat stripes. Tabby cats have white whiskers and white hair around the nose and eyes. In fact, they’re very cute. There are two tabbies who patrol our block and in the process, go through our yard. I’ve never had my camera at hand to grab a snap of their coloring.

Speaking of cameras, I have a new camera phone, an iPhone 13 Pro. Getting the thing hooked up to T-Mobile took over an hour on the phone with tech support, but now it’s perfect. We got such a deal from Sprint (T-Mobile, really) that the phone is effectively a straight-up swap of my three-year old iPhone XS to an 13 Pro. Why such a deal? Because we’re such “good” customers. The funny thing is, all we do to be a good customer is to pay our bill on time.

June 13, 2021 -- Rebelle 4 Sketch

Drawn and painted with Rebelle 4

Today I’m feeling less overall pain in my upper back and left shoulder. I’ve been practicing a strict hang-loose treatment for my left arm, with no lifting of any kind, not even lifting my iPad Pro. Only when you have a bad shoulder do you realize how heavy “light” devices really are.

For the sketch above I used Rebelle 4’s fountain pen brush. For feel, it’s no match for my low-end Lamy fountain pen and some cheap drawing paper from a Big Box store. But, for speed and versatility, digital wins every time. On the other hand, for timelessness and original art, real ink wins every time. Fortunately, we live in an time when we can use both and love both digital and traditional tools. That abundance creates a problem for me: I get confused when I have too many chose. I need to be able to pick one tool and get really good at it.

Clip Studio Paint EX Update Bombs

I had only a few minutes to work on my book today, and when I opened Clip Studio Paint I was greeted with a cheery message — there’s a new version of CSP with new brushes and other cool junk. So I naively installed the latest and greatest version.

To my dismay, my new PC with it’s stellar CPU suddenly slowed down to the pace of my 1985 Kaypro. No big deal, I naively thought. There are bugs. I’ll revert to the previous version, 1.10.6. It took less than 5 minutes to remove and reinstall CSP. Then came the big surprise — when I tried to open an image that I had edited in the latest and greatest version, it was locked. My image could no longer be edited in version 1.10.6. I’m officially screwed. The only way I can recover that image is to upgrade again.

Well, all of this angst and hustle and bustle and flaky software is too much un-fun for me. I’m going to call it a long, disappointing day and go watch some CHINA, IL. It’s not disappointing in any way.

Pencil and Paper Rocks

Today, at my part-time day job, I edited and critiqued about 70 proposals, down from about 100 last week. I’ve streamlined the process enough that my stress level has stabilized at a simmering boil.

The sketch is one of my morning warmup experiments. Sometimes I get an itch to go against the grain of working in a predominantly digital environment. Getting my hands dirty with graphite dust feel good. It’s down to earth and has taught me that there’s no way that a digital pencil can replace a one dollar lead pencil. I’ve tried pencils in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, Procreate, blah, blah, blah, and none of them, even if they’re running on a $3,000 computer, can equal the effect of a humble graphite pencil.

All the same, for doing comix, I’m all in for digital. When you need to crank out 48 pages and you have limited time, it’s Clip Studio Paint EX all the way. But for drawing and getting the feel of graphite in your life, it’s hands down the lead pencil.