It’s still only September yet it was impossible to get the brain working this dark morning. The weather forecast sunshine but not much light reached the ground here in the North West where the sky was a brown murk for most of the day. There was also no news about the Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 edition), not even a launch date despite it supposedly hitting stores today. I'm beginning to think it’s time to retire my high-tech banner and get things back to normal. The whole venture has been an unqualified disappointment. Not even a smartly worded letter from Samsung thanking me for my book and cartoon. There hasn’t even been an email from the Emir of Qatar confirming my million quid.
Today was meant to be a day of cartooning. No sooner had one competition come to an end than a friend sends me details of another. It’s not a bad thing and might get me working again. The cartoons that don’t make my final selection will end up here, providing I can get this unreliable brain of mine to start producing something funny. I wish I understood how it worked. As I’ve said before, sometimes the ideas just rush out and I can’t scribble them down quickly enough. Other times, it’s worse than pouring molasses.
To get my brain going, I took the day off and cycled to the local PC World where I played some more with the first generation Note. I’m pretty certain that I won’t be able to afford the new Note but there’s a slim chance I might be able to pick up the first generation in the next month. I have a birthday coming up, the chance of some paid work, plus I understand eBay prices for organ donors are at an all-time high… Anyway, my second play with the Note was better than the first. I still think the stylus is *far* too small for my fingers (to the point that I find it difficult to hold) but Sketchbook Pro was really fun to use, much more intuitive than the PC version, and I found I could draw with a high degree of precision. I’m sure there must be settings to get the pen sensitivity working with Photoshop but I got it working with Sketchbook and it was pretty damn good. Palm rejection also seemed to be working too. It’s still not the same as working on paper but that’s to be expected. However, having layers to work with should make for a different, perhaps even improved, workflow: sketch cartoons before using a new layer to do the inking. But that’s me figuring out the technicalities. I can’t allow myself to think like this. I need to draw cartoons, stop being distracted, and hope some work comes my way in the next month.
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