After checking out a few drawing apps on my mom's iPad, I went down and picked up my own one last night. I chose 3rd generation, white and silver, 64 gig with wifi. Still checking out different apps; this one is called Procreate.
Haven't yet found a drawing app that comes close to my blog's enhanced-stick-figure style, so I'll continue to use my desktop/Flash/Wacom setup for my work here. But the iPad is an absolutely fab tool for drawing anywhere - as an artist, I hafta say it's setting me free. And yes, I did lick it when I took it out of the box. Didn't stop the 12 year old boy from trying to lick it too though.
For those who are wondering, the new iPad is slightly warm, but it's not hot or uncomfortable and I was drawing on it for hours. I have yet to explore it's other uses. Everyone keeps asking me to play Draw Something on it, but I hear it's super addictive, no?
I've been toying with the idea of getting an iPad. I mainly want to use it as a portable digital sketch book to create rough drawings for my blog, on the fly. Before I dish out the money the Board of Directors in my head want to know what the drawing apps can do. So I borrowed my mom's iPad, got myself a Wacom stylus and loaded up on apps.
As far as duplicating my blog style, which is drawn in Adobe Flash, this is how it panned out so far.
I started with Sketchbook Pro - it felt good, though it's not a vector program. I don't mind it too much as a sketchy version of my blog drawings. What do you think? It does have a lot of 'feel'... and I did eventually discover the all-important-purple ha ha.
And then I tried a vector program called iDraw. The pencil tool only gives a line with uniform thickness.
So I gave the brush tool a shot - it can do thick and thin, but only calligraphy style. I don't like it. I found it difficult to control the select tool in iDraw.
Adobe Ideas was actually cool. It's super simple to use and the brush feels amazing. I think it came closest to the look of my blog style. But it's a little too simple for my needs. There's not nearly enough layers, there's no way to merge layers and there's no way to grab the whole image and move it around.
Then I went back to Sketchbook Pro and did this drawing of my dog. Holy crap this thing is fun!!!
So what's the verdict - should I spring for an iPad or what? Do you guys think you can handle the occasional post done in a sketchy style?
Yesssss! Three days late, the UPS truck finally did show up. But not before first calling me to say the package was lost. Oh, ok, they didn't use the word "lost", pardonnez-moi; they simply said they couldn't "find" it. Sounds kinda like LOST don't it?!? Which made me feel like half way between broken-hearted and barfing.
Thirty agonizing minutes later... I'm not sure if it was the twitter angels bringing my plight to the attention of @EvanAtUPS or what, but just then the doorbell suddenly rang.
And voilà!
What's that yucky brown stain? See this animation.
My joy was somewhat shortlived. During all this waiting for the brown UPS truck, the electricity company somehow managed to accidentally disconnect my phone AND internet, shaving yet another decade off my life expectancy.
So here I sit, stuck at home waiting for yet another coupla guys in different coloured trucks to show up and fix it...
And since I'm sitting around waiting, I'm trying to install Bootcamp on this crazy Macbook Pro myself, and it's eating me alive.
It's important to have a sense of humour in life; animation comes in especially handy for this as you might imagine, haha. I tweeted all day long about my wayward Macbook Pro, (which I bought after seeing a DEAD Rat), that was apparently supposed to be delivered last Friday, and was apparently going to be delivered any minute now.
Now this laptop is no ordinary luxury item - I mean, yeah, it's kickass and all - but I need it for work, because I have an animation job I have to deliver right after my family vacation. I know, I'm not supposed to work on my vacation; but for me, it's actually fun. I mean really wanted to get the badass Dell, but it wasn't going to get delivered in time, so I went for the Mac instead. They promised me I'd make my deadline. You get the irony here? Dudes I am leaving in ONE WEEK. It's getting a little tight!
My twitter following is awesome; they held my hand ALL DAY LONG. One of them, super dude @DaddyYoEffinRox of the DaddyYoBlog, suggested I animate this. I thought it totally RAWKED!! So I did =D
And...I offer it to you, all my lovely tweeples who helped me crawl through the day. It's short but hey, so is life, right?
Now please cross your fingers that I get that *bleep* *bleep* *bleeeeeeep* ing laptop tomorrow.
