I produce a webcomic, and I do it digitally from start to finish. But just because I don’t use paper in my process doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in new tools.

Wacom just released the Inkling. Here’s how Aegir Hallmundur from the Ministry of Type describes it.

What the device offers is convenience, and a bit of magic. It’s less hassle than scanning or photographing your notebooks, and you get scalable vectors nicely separated into whatever layers you want. You can draw an outline sketch and then feel free to scribble and annotate all over it, knowing each addition can be turned on and off and moved about at will, or even deleted entirely. That’s the real appeal of this thing.

Read his review. He covers how it converts the art, the software used to manage the files, and how it does vectors.

Personally, I don’t like it. Too hinky a system for $200.

The Wacom Inkling – a review

The Inkling at Wacom.com

Many times an agency will mock up a design direction in order to get a client to sign off on it. Once they have it approved they’ll approach me with their rough idea and want me to flesh it out into it’s final form. This type of project usually means I’ll be leveraging both my design and illustration skills to pull it off.

This project will take you through the entire creative process I used to pull off this illustrative logo design, from shooting my own photo reference material to refining my vector artwork with precision.

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Logo Illustration

In this tutorial we’re going to explore the graphics created for the Olympic Winter Games recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia. Throughout the winter games, they had a continuing graphic theme of very stylized vector art. Here, we’ll achieve a similar effect using only Adobe Illustrator and a PSD file of a snowboarder. Follow along below to learn more about vector graphics.

It’s sometimes strange to realize that, despite the fact that I live in Illustrator for making my comics, I really only use a small portion of the application.

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Vector Effects in Adobe Illustrator

I can’t, I confess, do any of this: I find that I am, in fact, an abstract painter. And it is this fundamentally experimental vocabulary — unruly and unplanned and gestural — that characterizes the work I not only can but want to make. What’s key in this equation is the process: assuming that all sketchbooks are meant to be a clearinghouse of subconscious thought, why is it that so many of us use our sketchbooks to annihilate that which lacks clarity, so that we can set the random thinking aside and consequently, produce more resolved work on the other end? On the other hand, if you think of your sketchbook as the end goal, what then? What if you start drawing with no idea about what you want to draw? What if your relationship with the pencil and the page is the whole point?

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Prisoners of Logic via The 99 Percent

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Sci-fi illustrations by Shusei Nagaoka

See more at his website

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William Werk | via io9

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Illustrative Lettering 3 – Fa La La La

The Winchcombe

Head over here to check out an 8-page preview of The Winchcombe, my new webcomic that will be debuting on January 5th, and appearing every Tuesday and Thursday.

The 30 Characters Challenge

November appears to be the month of challenges, what with National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month. In the spirit of the November challenges, Tyler James, creator of several webcomics, has organized the 30 Characters Challenge.

The challenge is to create 30 new characters, one for each day in November. We’ve been at it for a couple of weeks now, and there’s quite a collection of interesting new characters to thumb through on your lunch break. Head over and check out the great work that some pretty creative and talented people have been putting in.

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30 Characters Challenge site

My Challenge Entries

The Winchcombe

I dig this image.

concept ships: Rory McLeish 3D concept ships.

You can buy this guy’s movie poster art. You may recognize some of it.

Granted it goes for for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. But you can still buy them.

via The Man Who Did Everything | World Famous Design Junkies