Change. People are resistant to change. But change can be so beneficial if you are open-minded enough to embrace what is good, while providing solutions to what is not. (Notice the lack of whining option?)

Take the stylus for example. Please … take it! I don’t need it for my iPhone or iPad. I just happen to have ten, eco-friendly, organic styli conveniently placed at my fingertips. Yes, it requires a conceptual jump. Just like the jump from analog to digital, only this time I am jumping to my fingers. Oddly enough I have been using my fingers for years for all sorts of stylus-type jobs. They are willing soldiers just waiting to do whatever job I point them at. They are sensitive, flexible, and exhibit almost no fear in the face of the unknown. The real demon here is not the lack of styli, it is the software. Software is UI driven. In a world of 27-inch computer monitors, or multiple monitors, software engineers have become lazy, or in some cases downright belligerent, in filling our screen real estate with endless panels and docks. When this problem is forced into a small space such as the iPhone, the UI becomes paramount.

If anything, Sketchbook Pro is a pioneer at clearing away the UI so that an illustrator can concentrate on creative expression. Their gesture-based lagoon on desktop machines does a reasonably good job at subjugating the UI to the priority of the work at hand.

It is not surprising then that they where able to successfully tackle the limited confines of the iPhone. It comes at a price, however; You have to change your way of thinking.

The jump is not hard. You just need to drop the idea of a single stylus point and start thinking in terms of gestures.

After a few tentative strokes your mind begins to make the connections. Soon your other fingers jump into the fray and you realize that pinching, pulling, moving, and gesturing through a drawing is pretty intuitive.

The iPhone and iPad and related software have not taken away our stylus, they have given us nine more. I suspect that improvements will be made in both hardware and software as time moves forward. But in a gesture driven device, the last thing I want is a single stylus holding me back. As a matter of fact, When I go back to the tablet on my desktop I start to crave the simplicity that iPhone gestures have provided. The tablet begins to feel much like the pencil did not so long ago; like a tool of a bygone era.

There is a weblog called Monsters in Real Places. You draw a monster and place it in picture. This week’s submission calls for the use of a Vancouver Olympic mascot in city close to you. I created “Quatchi” at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Yes, I know that my version of Quatchi is less cute and is sport’n a tude. Go figure! A quick Friday morning distraction. Drawn and painted in Photoshop.

The descriptive blurb that is supposed to accompany the picture:

“The now famous Vancouver Quatchi, with the Winter Olympics behind him, settles down to some golf and sunshine at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Shhhh … he is about to take his shot.”

The Website: Monsters in real places
The Real Quatchi (and friends)

My blog site is not immensely popular, but it has it’s moments. I average about 15K-20K hits a month. There are spikes of course. Every once in a while, somebody with middle eastern connections will trip across the editorial cartoon I did of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will cause a flurry of comments, which I ignore. (I shut down the comment thread for this blog post a year ago; out of sheer boredom.) Of course the comments and the hits bring relevance to the post in Google’s eyes, which position it higher in the search engine. This means more eyes see it, which feeds its relevance. Again, those who see it, almost without exception, send links of it to their militant friends, which Google watches. Some of these people will post the article, or the caricature link inside a web forum, which will also cause a flurry of inbound links and then subsequent outbound moves to other relevant sites. All of which reflects positively on the page which they just left. (Mine.)

I sometimes wonder if those who are so militantly apposed to the cartoon (going on three years old) realize that they make it popular by visiting it and commenting on it? If you want to kill something on the web, ignore it. It will get buried under a mountain of apathy and nobody will see it. The more you rubberneck a particular post, the more other people will slow down to look at what you are looking at. It is a simple fact. Congrats to Google for quantifying this quirk of human nature into the most powerful search algorithm in the world.

However, this past month Mahmoud took a back seat to a new key-word rising star on my blog. This magic phrase is “bubble butt.” I mean really? How disappointing this hit must be for the ardent connoisseur of bubble butt when he(?) arrives at my post to see the G-rated rant about my anatomical drawing issues. It makes me chuckle a bit to be honest.

People all over the world are searching for criticlal relevant information, and the nexus is Mahmoud Bubble Butt. There’s a cartoon in there someplace. But the mental image is far to powerful to reproduce. Sometimes it is better not to draw what you see in your minds eye. Sometimes it is better to just let go.

After an exhaustive test of Blogo (by Brainjuice software.) I have decided I LOVE it and purchased it today. (The timed trial ended.) I must say that the interface is as simple as it gets, and the desktop power is incredible. I am a pretty finicky guy when it comes to my blogs. I like to have the graphics, and thumbnails, and the content, and tags, and categories all working for me. Finding a desktop client to post my content from my desktop is an easy enough task. There are a lot of programs out there that accomplish this job. But finding a client that will allow me to post from my desktop, where I will have 100% confidence that what I posted will look like it is supposed to, and have all the necessary meta info at the same time, so that I do NOT need to redundantly re-visit my site to fix the things the desktop client got wrong; That is a truly gifted product.

An added bonus was the Twitter feature that is built into Blogo. Stay with me now, ’cause the geekery is going to get a bit thick. But I have a pretty active Facebook page. I use it for work, rambling and keeping up with colleagues as well as friends and family. I also have a twitter account that is mostly geared towards my Web Comic: Artist Gullible. I have recently discovered a Facebook app that reads selective Twitter posts and places them on my Facebook page, often killing two birds with one stone. This is cool, but to level up, I can now create a blog entry in Blogo, twitter about it from Blogo and Facebook will then pick up the twit and the link back to my original blog post. ALL WITHOUT LEAVING MY DESKTOP!

My geekery is now complete and I am actually being more productive doing it.

It has been a long time coming, and I have not yet reached the point where I can say to myself that it is finished (is there ever such a point?) but I have successfully updated my portfolio and made some navigation changes.

To start off, I killed all the drilling down into specific folders and lumped all my logos and advertising together. I have also brought all my illustration under one umbrella. This should make it easier to view samples and keep navigation simple. I have moved my sculpting portfolio off of this site and I am moving it to another domain. I know this goes contrary to what I was saying earlier this year, but it never felt right to have it sort of frankenstein-ed onto this site. Instead of a blog, however, I think that my sculpting site will be a stand alone informational site. We will see, a lot of this rearranging is still in the air.

Comments or no comments? The rest of this site is open to comments and those of you who read and send “good vibes” my direction are encouraged to keep doing so. A few of you have noticed that I do not have my portfolio open for comments. I am not sure why I choose to do this? It is not like my portfolio is more “formal” than the other parts of my blogfolio. I will think about it. If you want to influence the decision, I can be bribed with M&Ms or you can leave a comment here.

My grandfather had the Sears catalog. During the depression, he would leaf through the pages and dream of things he could never afford. It provided a generation with the catalyst for hope; unbound avarice. Gone is the Sears catalog and their pages of advertising delights, but in our current economic times I gotta admit that I too, turn to a catalog for my hope of better times and looser budgets.

My catalog of choice is ThinkGeek. It is filled with the things that make me go “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna!” Where else can you buy the world most convenient surge protector (the squid), a titanium spork, astronaut ice-cream, and caffeinated soap?
This past week was April fools and like every year, they offered a never before seen product. A Tauntaun sleeping bag. It is the coolest thing ever. Although meant as a joke, it generated enough response that they are actually thinking about creating it for real. Is this America or What? My 5 year old saw it and went crazy. He can’t wait to sleep in the belly of the beast.

This is just another reminder that I am geeky without reproach.

I have made my ebook a priority and decided to take it live on Oct. 31st. Of course that means setting up a real domain and doing site transfer from one place to another. No biggie right? Wrong. My test site was built using ComicPress 2.1 and version 2.5 has new CSS base code. So I had to go through each line of code and rework it to match what I had before. Not impossible, just a pain in the backside.

Anyway the new site is up and working. I am sure I will be tweaking it indefinitely but it is a start. Now I can concentrate on drawing a few posts as my posting cushion.

Oh yeah, the new (and final) address is: www.ArtisteGullible.com

Students sometimes fret over the complexity of PhotoShop and how overwhelming the breadth and depth of the program can be. Certainly it is the “Queen Mary” of applications. But the power of the program does not overshadow how useful it can be for very small, in-and-out jobs. In this sense, The Queen Mary becomes a sporty little power boat. For example, I have a client for whom I am building a corporate blog. I use WordPress for blogs 99% of the time because of the widget, plugin, and theme support from a very active open source community. This means I can block out a site quickly using a theme and then leverage PhotoShop and CSSedit to change graphics and styles to match whatever look and feel I am going for.

This particular header piece uses pictures from iStockphoto and combines them into a composite with very little done to them other than some simple masking, and basic changes in layer properties. In and out in 30 minutes, and that includes the time spent looking for photos. I love this program!

This has been an awful test of my patience, but I have stumbled across a third party direction on how to fix my WP 2.5 problem. The generic and almost useless direction from WP forums was to reinstall all the files and make sure that they were copied correctly. I did this three times (there are hundreds of files) and found nothing. A blogger then wrote to check on the “wp-includes/media.php and wp-settings.php” and make sure they are intact (re-upload them). I did check on them and sure enough there were partial files there in the directory when compared to the original files. (You can deduce this by comparing file sizes, in this case 10k vs 16k). I immediately re-uploaded these files and cleared the cache and restarted the browser and all seems to be well.

So the bottom line is; Yes the forum support was right. Make sure the files were uploaded correctly and all is well. However, why did I have to dig off some third party site to focus on these particular files? Or is this just me protecting my ego? Anyway. it seems to work.

Here is the link to the FAQ that answered the question.

Yeah! First day of class. Our first assignment is an exploration of Storyboards and visualizing in 3D. Most of this semester is an exercise in breaking the visual plane and turning ourselves from passive viewers in front of a flat glass box into creative professionals who can insert and rotate themselves in imaginary worlds to find the “best” shot. This applies to art directing a product photo shoot, to conceptualizing a magazine layout, to producing a commercial or conceptualizing a film.

A couple of templates we will be using in class:

tv-strybrd2.pdf
tv-strybrd-6x.pdf

The joke sheet:  jokes.doc

and a weblink for discussion purposes:

Josh Sheppard