Saturday 6 December 2014

Late Night Ramble To Retain My Blogging Record

Saturday was a strange day. I'd struggled to draw last night. I wanted to have another crack at that wonderful Farage face but nothing I did worked. I went to bed wondering what was wrong with me only to wake up in the middle of the night feeling slightly sick. When I fell back to sleep, my brain became the scene of one of the craziest dreams I've ever had. It was all over the place. One moment I was in a James Bond film and then I was William Shatner arriving at a diner where grateful waitresses then helped me fill my face with cream cakes. Somewhere in that mix were fragments of my day (I'd read that Shatner has launched a Kickstarter campaign) as well as some deep subconscious wisdom that knew that a cream cake I'd eaten yesterday had probably upset my stomach.

I woke late and doodled but still felt under the weather. Nothing worked for me. It was only late in the day that my mild nausea passed and, just like that, my 'eye' came back. The face that had defeated me for almost a day, suddenly appeared on my tablet.

This week, I want to see if I can work out a better process of colouring my cartoons. I work on the Samsung Note 10.1 using Artflow but Artflow has only a basic feature set when it comes to paints. I should really bring my cartoons over to the PC but I find that becomes a long and pretty laborious business. I never feel comfortable using a tablet to my side and I just wish I could find a better colouring app on Android.

I think that's unlikely. I want something that can produce some textured colours, not just the perfect tones you often get with a digital pen. I think for the time being my cartoons might have to remain uncoloured. Android is great and the Samsung Note about as powerful as these tablets get at the moment. Yet there's no way they can run a proper art package. Not unless you move up to something like the Microsoft Surface Pro but, for me, they're in the dream realm of £700+ for the basic model and £900+ for anything with a proper bit of muscle. Above those, Wacom have launched their own Windows tablet, which are like portable versions of the Cintiq monitors, complete with beautiful matt screens and a huge canvas. It's an amazing time for this new technology and there's some amazing software out there. Manga Studio 5 looks great and apparently has a great ink pen engine but it's currently unavailable for Android.

Anybody out there colouring artwork using Android? I'd love to hear about any recommendations for tools I can use.

No comments:

Post a Comment