House of Scott

I can’t send cards to everyone, but I thought I’d post the image I created for my holiday card this year. It’s the first time I’ve made a physical card and I’m quite happy with the results! I’ve posted some process and photos of the end result under the cut. (more…)

Steve LeCouilliard contacted me on the weekend asking for a little help on a cause that I’ve increasingly been worried about. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill aimed at fighting online piracy in all shapes and forms. Which in itself is not a bad thing. Creators deserve to be paid for what they do, and protections against out right theft should be in place. But in it’s current form SOPA goes too far. (more…)

I saw Tangled on the weekend. I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed. I’m by no means a film reviewer, so I’ll leave that to the professionals. But do yourself a favour and go see the film, I say it in 2D (not much of a fan of the 3D) and had a great time! Another reason you should really go see it though is for the credits. At least the first bit, before it switches to standard credits.* Here’s a somewhat poor quality YouTube video of them:

I was blown away by the life in the drawings, the energy in the brushstrokes, though probably digital, are beautiful. I would watch an entire movie animated with those brush strokes as a model. So like I often do, I got momentarily obsessed and made it my mission to track down the illustrator behind them. Google don’t fail me now!

Who I found was Shiyoon Kim. Can’t find much out about him besides his love of animation and pop locking. But he has an art blog! And there’s a post featuring a few of the illustrations (which is where I linked the top illustration from. Go check it out!

*But from a typography and design perspective, the post illustration credits were really well designed too! The gentle undulating centre margin running down the screen did a really good job of evoking Rapunzel’s hair.

A little wind up bird that sits on my desk at work.

This is also an excuse to test the WordPress app on my phone…

I was so strong. I watched the keynote, saw the specs, and came away impressed. But what surprised me was that I had no intention to buy an iPad. I don’t have a lot of disposable income, and between a smart phone (can you guess what it is?) and a desktop ( yeah, I drank the Kool-Aid ) I couldn’t justify needing an iPad. So I ogled from afar, tracked the buzz, and hoped I would trip over a bag of money on the street.

When I first saw the iPad, I thought it’d be great for me with only two App additions (AppAdds?): a portfolio app, and a good sketchbook app. The current lineup of apps offered neither ( I suppose Photos would work as a stop gap portfolio in a pinch and Brushes could be a decent sketchbook ) until today when Adobe had to whip out Adobe® Ideas 1.0.

It looks like a great rough sketchpad for on the fly doodling in colour with resizable vector based brushes, plus some handy little features for building a colour palette and exporting the whole thing to Illustrator or Photoshop. This little app could potentially become the replacement for the trusty pencil/sketchbook combo most designers and artists rely on. Here’s the feature list:

Features:
• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo

Will I buy an iPad now? Probably not. Will I buy an iPad when they’re available in Canada? Probably not then either.  As a tool for an artist or designer it’s still a little lightweight for what I’d really want it for, and for what most of my peers would want it for. Which is essentially a powerful laptop with an accurate touchscreen. The iPad is not the hardware. Nor is Adobe Ideas the software that would replace  the scribbly nature of a pencil on paper sketchbook. I can still get ideas and annotation down faster in an analog. My ideas flow too fast for a capacitive screen to pick up my nuanced scribbles of my hand and still have me decipher them later.

In it’s current state, Adobe Ideas looks like a great… I hesitate to say it: toy. The hardware is too limited, to let the software be a true viable replacement for a professional to replace a small sketchbook and pen in a pocket. But I can see the day coming when apps and hardware will slowly replace my trusty 2B pencil doodles on a collection of spiral bound paper; and I’m pretty certain some future version of Adobe Ideas will be a part of it.