DRAWING IN CIRCLES

Was messing around with the idea of some more modern brute looking goblins.

Sorry been pretty damn busy lately. Trying to teach myself a little bit of Unity everyday while taking a class from Sam Neilson, while teaching myself guitar and piano and working a bit late while also trying to work out more and trying to cure AIDS. Oh well!

 Done for a 8-Bit activity. I can't remember if there was NES Kirby game but I do at least remember the GameBoy one being pretty enjoyable.

Dear Willem Dafoe,







Love,
-Mike

Last of the Galloway class bits. We had to design a mailman, so I designed the one who ends up having to deliver mail regularly to classic cinema monsters.

Leftover from the Galloway class.

More Sean Galloway class stuff.


For some reason about this time of year I end up developing a crazy eye twitch from my eyes drying out. So it looks like I'm trying to wink or bat my eyes at everyone in a cheesy fashion.

I never actually got around to posting most of the stuff I did in Sean Galloway's class back in January. Here's one of the characters I ended up designing in his class, a Russian robot repairman.

Here's my take on the Lenovo Thinkpad X201 Tablet PC as an artist who likes to bring his Photoshop/Painter/SAI with him. I found out about the Thinkpad mostly from this article which seemed to give it pretty good reviews. I was also considering the Fujitsu Lifebook T900, but the price to me wasn't worth the ho-hum battery life.

Ordering the laptop itself from Lenovo was a major ordeal since they couldn't figure out how to charge my card despite having the bank themselves say it was completely legit, but Lenovo still felt like stringing me along for two weeks. I eventually canceled my order after 2+ weeks of waiting and managed to get the same laptop on sale much cheaper, and significantly faster from Overstock.com. (2 days)

Anyways, onto the laptop. I'm coming from a Toshiba Tecra M4, which I got 4 years ago and really enjoyed despite it's clunky size, viewing angles, and short battery life. So in theory an upgrade should be an easy impress by now right? Well, not exactly.

The Shit:
- Getting Wacom driver pressure sensitivity working on this thing was a total bitch, and I was rather fortunate Davi Blight had gone the ordeal before I did and made ironing out the problems easier. Basically the TabletPC driver Wacom and Lenovo both supply is crap- it's fine for moving the mouse but forget about pressure sensitivity. What I ended up having todo is installing (ironically) Wacom drivers Fujitsu setup for their Lifebook series. That's pretty fucking embarassing for a tablet PC of all things. Considering tablet pen interactive is the foundation of what the machine is about, neglecting support of such functionality is a clear symbol of slack ass developers. Unfortunately, I've heard about this also happening on Toshiba Tablet PCs now so I'm not even sure what to make of it. Perhaps it's something involving Windows7 Tablet PC integration and its tablet functionality not playing well with Wacoms? Or is Wacom just shitting the bed on tablet PC support.

- I got one with a multi-touch screen because I had seen the viral Fujitsu video of a guy panning the canvas with his hand (iPad style) and drawing, and figured maybe Windows 7 would make such awesome interaction possible. Hell no. Windows 7 touch screen support is pretty lame. It's exactly the same as a desktop computer except now you're using your fingers instead of a mouse. The touch screen actually got in the way of drawing most of the time and would cause crazy drawing lines to fly out from nowhere. In a mixed reaction of fortune, having to install the Fujitsu Wacom drivers disabled multi-touch interactivity. UPDATE: A clean re-install of the drivers re-enabled multi-touch, though I ended up disabling it again.

On a side note there's some YouTube video demoing the interactive touch apps the Lenovo team developed to make touch screen worth it. 1) They're pretty much useless (why should I press a button on the laptop to bring it up to adjust my volume when I can just press the volume button on the laptop instead?) 2) Whenever I tried launching this app it took ages to launch. At least 10-30 seconds. Pretty much everytime I was confused if the thing was actually launching.

- Face button bugs. The buttons next to the screen (for rotating the screen resolution) tend to stop working after hibernation. I haven't figured out the fix for this yet and have to usually rotate my resolution by hand in the display settings. UPDATE: Fixed with a clean re-install of the Fujitsu drivers.

- Photoshop will produce graphical glitches with the mouse if used in Portrait mode. I'm not sure what this is all about since Davi Blight doesn't have this problem at all. But, Photoshop runs just fine in landscape tablet mode- and as much as I want to be pissed about having to do that I really enjoy Photoshop more in landscape mode anyways cause of all those damn floating windows.


The Get:
+ The battery life is enjoyable. I think they advertise 8 hours for the model I have, which is of course fucking lies. But still I can mange to get roughly 2-5 hours of battery which I consider a nice boost to my Toshiba's 1-2 hours. The Thinkpad seems pretty adamant about optimizing to save battery life as well.

+ It's very light. Holding my Toshiba like a drawing pad while standing up was out of the question. With the Thinkpad it's small and light enough that holding it is pretty comfortable. It's definitely no iPad in terms of lightweight, but it'll work for me and feels like a thick sketchbook.

+ Performance is great. Granted I got a high powered one, but it boots up cold (45sec-1min) and from hibernation(23sec) satisfyingly quick. I would pretty much need 2-5 minutes before I could do anything on my Toshiba.

+ This one is sort dumb, but typing on the keyboard is crazy satisfying.

So there it is. Part of me wants to return the thing, but I wouldn't know what to get in place of it that would have the same satisfying weight, battery power, and performance for this price. It still really feels like producers of Tablet PCs don't know what kind of market they're completely missing to tap on with digital artists, and seem content to make laptops that just happen to use Wacom pens so business yokels can scribble words onto sticky note apps.

Does it beat an iPad? Yes, absolutely. I think so at least. Fuck finger/stick painting and no pressure sensitivity. Would this thing replace a Cintiq? Of course not, but I'd like to see you bring your Cintiq out into the open and draw with it.

The Painter IX relations continue. I think if I block out most of the work in Photoshop and just leave Painter for rendering it works out quite well.

When all else fails, drawing robots with strange heads is always entertaining. I'm trying to find ways to brainwash myself into believing that painting is significantly more fun than Team Fortress 2. Painting is pretty fun, but god damn that game is ruining my life.
This happens every year. Every damn year I fall back in love with Painter IX, like an ex-loved one who's back in town and good times are had. And every year it ends with screaming and things being set on fire. I want this to be the year that works! So here's the plan Photoshop, I'll come home to you and the kids but I still get to mess around with that Painter floozy on the side. Deal?

Re-designed my blog/website, yada yada. Here's some art!

Loading up and testing tweaks to art over and over at work can sometimes become long and tedious, so to cope I doodle on post-its a lot. I'm fairly convinced mechanical HB .5 pencil on post-it paper is the best drawing combo I've experienced so far.

My poor Toshiba Tecra M4 is on it's last legs once again. That lifesaving surgery I had performed on it worked for a little time, but ultimately only produced new cancerous ruin. So now I'm giving a Lenovo Thinkpad X201 a run. Even though it's smaller than my Tecra, the size actually makes it a lot friendly for sketching since it doesn't weight much and is about the size of a medium-large book.

The thing that might drive me away is Lenovo's neglect of the actual tablet part of the laptop- y'know, just the whole point of this model. Their Wacom drivers don't support pressure, and Wacom's TabletPC drivers on this machine don't either, strangely enough. So I have to use Bamboo Pen & Touch drivers instead. Plus many other small annoying glitches when trying to engage portrait made that made drawing frustrating until I managed to pinpoint what was going on and smash it.


That said, once I got shit running right it was pretty enjoyable and I realize how much I missed just fucking around on a tablet PC at a coffee shop or something. Above is a character I doodled for Scott McKie's branching-storyline RPG thingamajig he's trying to make.

Finally took the plunge and upgraded to a Intuos 4 after happily spending my life up to this point with a giant Intuos 1. This has gotta be the best way to upgrade anything IMO, because the difference is very enjoyable and satisfying. A product design side note is that their packing design is surprisingly slick.

I got tagged for another character tag team at the Unit-16 forums. Here's Aeronik's warrior bear mcDude.

ME: fucking MATH
ME: it's pissing in my eyesocket!
Scott: the burning sensation is how you know it's working.
ME: But it's eating the inside of my braaaaiin!
Scott: it has to. it's making room to lay its math eggs.
ME: D:

On one hand, delicious liquid! On the other hand, further dehydration from exploding anus.

In other news my website is lost in the annoying void of DNS propagation after a server upgrade. So do not fret if damn near all my images are broken for another day or so.

1. When inspiration strikes, go for it then and there. If you're in a situation where you can drop everything and tap it, then by all means do it. Whatever you make with that moment of inspiration will be stronger than anything you'll make without it.

Another character tag team. This one was Aeronik's idea. And now I realize how grannies and tommy guns are like chocolate and peanut butter.