GOZR Drawing

Working on some new GOZR stuff.

One thing I loved about making this game was just how liberating it was. I was inventing a new game right there on the page, drawing and noodling and doodling all on the canvas as I went. I didn't have a ton of preliminary thought on this. I just kind of went into it wild.

I created the entire project digitally, drawing it with my Intuos 4 tablet and Photoshop 7. This is old tech, now. Most of you who use digital tools probably use much more recent hardware and software. Hell, PS7 came out in 2002 for fuck's sake. What the hell am I doing using 22 year old software?

Because the shit works for what I do. It's not like they didn't understand how to make drawing software 22 years ago. They did. And PS7 was very good for drawing (the way I do it).

Anyway, software and hardware aside, it is very liberating to draw digitally. I know I've been talking about how much I absolutely love drawing with traditional media for the past several years, but I'm also a big huge lover of drawing digitally. And I'll tell you why.

When I was working on GOZR pages I could let my creativity go nuts because of the great benefit of the medium: nothing is permanent. Lay down a bunch of strokes that you don't like? Undo. Or erase. Either way, they're gone. Do some different ones. You put that d6 table too close to the edge of the canvas? Nudge the whole thing over. Or you can just shove words or sentences or images around willy-nilly. You can reduce the size of something a little bit so you can fit another d6 table. You can fade something into the background so you can put some words over it.

In a word, this is fun.

Not that I'm abandoning all those brush pens I yak about.

You see, that's the beauty of being a free spirit artist. You don't have to marry one thing or the other. You can draw on your tablet, then shove it to the side and whip out a sketchbook. And I do that all the time.

Currently working on some GOZR revisions and a comic. Have a great Sunday.

More Clip Studio

Just sharing some of the rough doodles I did in Clip Studio Paint. If you're wondering why I'm talking about this at all you have to understand that I've been using Photoshop 7 ever since it came out. That's like almost 20 fucking years. If it ain't broke...

So I recently started messing with Clip because the software has gotten better and I had the desire to do more painting. Now, my biggest drawback is that I'm still rocking the same computer I've had for many moons. I'm kind of a creature of habit, you see. So far the limitations of this machine haven't exceeded my patience and well... if it ain't broke...

I do hope to get a new machine at some point. But not now.

Anyway. Sketches below were done with various brushes, mostly from the Frenden pack. Which is aweome. Fave brush so far is Consistent Carl because it's just god damn consistent.

Clip Studio

I have been using the same drawing software for... oh my god... when did Photoshop 6 come out? I used it, then got PS 7 when it was out and I've been using PS 7 ever since. Looks like version 8 (CS) started in 2003. So I've been using PS 7 since probably 2001. Now, I haven't been drawing digitally that long. I was using it to color and clean up scans prior to 2008 when I started using a drawing tablet.

Currently I'm testing out Clip Studio Paint. I messed around with Krita and Gimp and a few others but never "used them" to any real degree. But Clip is nice. So far I'm kind of loving it.

Art is Art

I made this post on Facebook here. It was not triggered by anything that has been said to me personally, just based on some things I've noticed lately here and there.

Sometimes I see people refer to traditional art (non-digital) as "hand drawn". But this is not a correct description of what they actually mean.

I mostly draw on a tablet at my computer. I promise you that 100% of everything I draw is "hand drawn".

The term you are looking for is probably "traditional". Which just means you have a preference for things that are not created digitally. Preferences are fine, of course. But I challenge you to look at art with an open mind and I bet you will eventually not care at all if the art you are seeing was created with a wooden pencil or a stylus.

The attached image here is a pencil drawing. It is completely digital and it was drawn by Will Terry's hand. Is there REALLY a meaningful difference between digital and traditional art? I don't believe there is. If there's anything in the world in which I can claim expertise it is this topic.

EDIT: Of course this post is about the experience of seeing art. The experience of creating it is very different and our preferences are really important. Some people need to feel the wooden pencil smashing into their finger flesh or to smell the toxic paint fumes. I always loved it when I had ink stains on my fingers. But for many many reasons I greatly prefer drawing on my tablet and I don't miss traditional drawing much at all. But that's just me. You do you.

Bad Bunny Landing

Here's a re-colored version of an old drawing. I like this much better. More atmo!

Krita vs. PS

She approached the elder ibberlings cautiously...

A bit of doodling in Krita. I enjoy drawing with Krita quite a bit more than Photoshop, however there are certain shortcuts and features in my old PS7 that I miss dreadfully.

Krita doesn't have good macros (yet). One of the macros I wrote for PS7 simply expands a selection, fills it with the foreground color, then deselects it. This is a time saver when doing big black fills and prevents those annoying ghostly white lines showing the edges of your fill area (the expansion of the selection takes care of this).

There's really one giant, huge benefit to drawing in Krita over PS7. I can draw at any scale and the lines are nice and smooth. In PS7 I have to zoom in very close to get the lines smooth. If I draw from a distance, the lines are jagged and wobbly like I have a problem controlling my hand. But that isn't the case with Krita. And I really like that.

Risen

The Risen character class by Jayne Praxis.

Krita Colorize Mask

I was playing around with Krita, coloring some existing drawings. In Photoshop, I used a filter called BPelt to do quick flat color fills on line art. It worked very well. All you had to do was create some line art with closed loops... that is, you couldn't have any open shapes. Like if you had a person's eye you couldn't leave the ink line open or else it would just fill the eye with the same color as the face.

BPelt would fill with random colors. So then you could easily use the paint bucket tool to click and fill each area with the color you prefer. Then it was just a matter of the fun work of doing highlights and what-not.

In Krita, there is a tool called Colorize Mask. You click it, then you get a mask on a layer and you can just sort of draw color lines where you want color to go. So you want the ork to be red, just draw a red line in the ork's body. A blue line across the sky, a brown line across the adventurer's face, etc. Then when you finish the mask it will fill those areas with those colors.

It's pretty nifty. For flat colors, this is the only way to fly. Believe me when I say there's no fun in carefully "hand coloring" vast areas of a drawing with a totally flat color. Might as well let Krita do it for you. Then you can pump your efforts into highlights, color adjustments, shadows, textures, or whatever.

Krita and the Dog

I saw Krita a while back, maybe 1 or more years ago. I think it was actually last December right after I got my XP Pen tablet. I have been using Photoshop 6 or 7 for YEARS. I was using 6 when 7 was released and I switched over a year or two later. So I was still using PS 7 until this week.

All of you young folks and/or digital art geeks are grasping your chests, gasping for air. WHY would anyone continue using an old, old, ancient graphics program for that long??

Well, because it works for me. I'm a simple kind of guy and I want to use my art tools, not learn them. I dislike the learning phase because it makes me feel hobbled.

Anyway... I saw Krita and was drawn to it (pun intended) because it was current, well supported, and open source. So I downloaded the bastard and discovered that my cursor was offset by a mile. I tried to re-calibrate and all the usual tricks. Nothing worked. XP Pen and Krita did not get along. So I let it go and continued with PS 7.

Then recently I happened upon Krita again and decided to give it another whirl. This time I found the right answer online (you have to set your tablet as primary monitor) and WHAM... I'm cooking with fire.

Below is the first finished drawing I have created with Krita. The learning curve is not too steep. A lot of my beloved hotkeys are not the same (though I can modify that if I want). But Krita, so far, has not failed to do all the things that Photoshop 7 was able to do (well... the Save For Web function is PH is fantastic and Krita doesn't have it... grumble). What's more, I like the workspace better, the pre-installed brushes are better, and the whole thing seems to work more smoothly.

Still going to take some time. I had a few functions built into PS 7 that I'll have to work into Krita. For example, when I hit F4 in PS it would expand the current selection by a few pixels, fill the selection with black, then deselect it. I really got used to using that for fills. Also I had a lot of custom brushes in 7 that I already miss. I'll have to brush up on how to make more in Krita.

Straight inks with some halftone using the #5 round brush... a classic.

Added flat colors with some highlights.