Digital Paint

I think I'm sliding into a black hole. I'm having a day when it feels like even my emails aren't being returned. Sent two today and both people have either chosen to ignore me (likely) or my emails are entering some interweb snarlup and not being delivered (less likely). It leaves me sitting wondering if I've done something to offend somebody. It's highly unlikely since I'm not the kind of person who likes to offend people I know.

Hmm...Not sure how to feel but my main work of the day finished, I'm going to draw a cartoon. Or I'll attempt to draw one, whilst checking my email three times a minute.

Talking about cartooning: I should really go back to using a real medium. Digital is just not giving me what I want. Nor, I suppose, is it giving me what I need.

I've finally come around to the realisation that I have to learn to use colour in my cartoons. I don't like using colour but perhaps that's not entirely true. I'm beginning to think I merely don't like using digital colour. Digital colour is too often just about a flat colour, which you have to work hard to layer with other colours to build up any kind of effect. Physical paint is rarely a single shade. Watercolour, for example, is an amazing medium, even if it's a devil to control. Yet it is (excuse the pun) fluid in a way that no digital paint can ever be. If you have a hugely powerful computer, you can find digital watercolours that try to act like real watercolours. Corel Painter has some pretty impressive 'real' paints which work but they take huge amounts of computational power to physically model the way that water soaks into the page, the way gravity drags it down, but also the way that it takes up and mixes with adjacent colours.

So, as I try to improve my skills as a cartoonist, I am trying to improve my skills with colour. It's not easy. Not when working digitally or, at least, working digitally on a Samsung tablet. The software isn't powerful enough to produce really convincing colours. Or, at least, I've not found software that can do that, whilst working on a canvas which is 4096 pixels wide and high. I've loved using this Note but I definitely feel like I'm pushing its capabilities. Perhaps going back to paper might be my next step. It just feels so drastic...