One Of Us, One Of Us...

I learned one of the most important lessons of my life the other day;

Laptops are not Ribena- proof.

Now this might seem fairly obvious to most of you, but ask yourself; "Am I sure? Have I actually tested the theory?"

I have. They're not.

So you can tick that one off the list. If you were ever unsure, now you don't have to be.

So my blessed old HP lappy is dead- drowned in a sticky puddle of delicious strawberry flavoured syrupy goodness. Have you ever spilled liquid on a computer? There's a tantalising second or two where you will be lead to believe that if you can just invert the machine and drain the wetness back the way it went in before it drips onto anything important then everything will be okay. This is a cruel deception. There is no hope. You're fucked. As soon as that water/ beer/ wine/ Ribena makes contact with you beloved electronic life-partner it's on a one-way trip to a flickery spasmodic death. And don't expect anything dramatic either, chances are for all your trouble all that'll happen is you'll get a ghostly after-image of the last thing your computer displayed before it unceremoniously fades to black, never to be revived.

But all is not lost.

Wise people keep backups.

Wiser people keep Mac-ups. (See what I did there?)

It took a few days, some wrangling with the financial department (Mum's can be ever so helpful) and a frantic search around the local PC World stores but I am now the ever-so-proud owner of a brand spanking new iMac!

SQUEEEEEEEE!

Never again do I have to worry about spillages on my desk- the sexy innards of my computer are now suspended four inches above any kind of liquid death housed behind a rather splendid 21.7" screen.

I've spent the last two days getting the thing set up the way I like it and transferring my iTunes library (a process nowhere near as arduous as I had been lead to believe) and now I'm ready to start work!

P.S. OH MY GOD MY WACOM WORKS SO MUCH SMOOTHER NOW!

P.P.S. I've been playing around with colouring a little on one of my DECONSTRUCTED pages, just to get used to using a mouse with no buttons and an OS that feels like someone turned WINDOWS upside down and tipped all the shit out.

Fingerpainting

Yep, that's right- two posts in two days! I'm on a roll baby! No seriously, I fear I may have been replaced with some sort of over productive pod-person. Please advise me of any other abnormal behaviour if I exibit it- for your own safety, and the safety of the planet.

So, what do the pictures below have in common (other than a less-than-usual adherance to form and proportion)?

They were all created using 'Sketchbook' rather than Photoshop.

'Big wow' I hear you say but the cool thing about Sketchbook is not that it offers an easy to use alternative to more expensive competitors (it retails at £1.79) but rather that it's an iPhone app.

The pictures below were constructed variously in the time between customers at work, on lunchbreak or, in the case of the last one, during the finale of the BBC's superb Moffat/Gatiss reworking of Sherlock Holmes- 'Sherlock' (Masterful, really really just bloody good television).

The app features a very respectable selection of tools and brushes, allows you to fiddle with layers and filters and even gives you a free-transform tool which, thanks to the touch interface is actually much easier to use than the one in photoshop- nifty.

From time to time I may upload more of these little pocket artworks, if nothing else creating them is teaching me better use of brushes and such- something I have historically never been too good at (always been more of a sketcher).

Hope you like these, and please forgive me if they're a bit rough- it's surprisingly hard to paint with your fingertip.

Beware 'Nudey Burning Chick'! I sometimes use this one to demonstrate the power of the iPhone for customers. I'm all 'Dude- I totally painted this in my iPhone' and they're all 'No way! You're a big fat liar!'

This is actually one of the first sketches of DECONSTRUCTED's Sophie I ever did!

And this is one of the most recent. The weird framing is to hide the fact that her body mysteriously stops at the shoulders.

Johnny Five... Is Alive!

Here we are again then... a couple of weeks later than planned. Again. Work continues to eat away at my time like a ravenous parasite that feeds on my ideas. Starting your day job at 8:30AM and getting home 12 hours later is not exactly conducive to the creative process.
None the less; here is DECONSTRUCTED page 5 in both its rough form (above) and the finalised version (below).
Please note in particular the tool box and equipment strapped to the front tread housing in the rough. An idea I really liked but forgot to render in my pencils for page 1 and thus had to leave out here for continuity. In fact if you look at the pencils for page one you'll notice that Sophie's footprints stomp around in place a little at the front tread- originally where she was to be retrieving tools. Maybe I'll get a chance to correct it later or it can be picked up in inks.

Nothing more to say other than to thank DECONSTRUCTED writer and creator Den Patrick for the awesome hardback copy of 'Slaine- The Horned God' (signed by Simon Bisley himself) I received in the mail today- a gift that actually made me SOL (Squee Out Loud) when I got home this evening.