Blog of All Trades

Art Materials

norights — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:49:22 +0000

I plan on posting tutorials about scanning/cleaning up traditional art and eventually some on making digital art. But first I should really cover the materials you want to be using. Now the decision on what tools you should use mostly comes down to what you’re comfortable with and what produces the look you’re after. I can tell you right now that certain materials are inferior, and they will be in an archival sense if you plan on preserving your originals, (Something I recommend for various reasons) but you might find you like their effects. I recall Paul McCartney saying the Beatles would overlay large numbers of tracks using a 4 track recorder by bumping previous tracks onto one and starting fresh. This resulted in a loss of quality but they liked that effect and it worked for them.
Paper
This is where most traditional art begins. If you’re drawing for reproduction, it’s good advice to start larger than the size of your final print. Partly because you give yourself more room to work with and partly because reducing your original tends to tighten the image quality. As for the type of paper you should be drawing on, you want something acid-free, preferably it should say “archival” on the package, but even common copy paper should store decently under proper conditions provided it’s acid-free. (In a dry environment, out of extreme temperatures and direct sunlight, kept flat) Penciling on copy and sketch book paper is fine but if you’re going to use ink you’d do yourself a favor to use something heavier. Cardstock and cardboard are good options, though bristol board has become something of a standard. Texture should also be kept in mind. Some artists like a rougher paper surface because it gives the line more character. Other folks like tighter control of their line quality. If you’re going to be using markers, marker paper is preferable because other types of paper tend to act like cotton and suck up the ink.
Ink
India ink is usually your best choice here. If the package says “archival” it’s preferable over “permanent” because most permanent inks are anything but. If you want to use ballpoint pens, Papermate comes highly recommended. Bic are a cheaper alternative, but they have a tendency to run and blot. I’m not too crazy about ballpoints because it takes so long to cover a large area properly with them and their ink tends to be shiny and reflective or sometimes more of a blue than a true black. But with enough time, patience, and skill, you can do some interesting things with them. Gel and felt tip pens are usually a step up. Sharpies are popular but remember they can fade or change color over time so you probably don’t want to use them for production. They also tend to run and you need to use them in a well ventilated room or else you will get a nasty headache. Zig makes some nice technical pens. Sakura also makes a wide range of inking solutions. I personally recommend their Pigma Microns. They have a brush pen but it’s not as nice as the Faber-Castell version. For markers I prefer Prismacolor, (note: does not play well with Chartpak markers. Don’t mix the two or they’ll dry out a lot faster) though Copic has a loyal following in the manga scene. Remember any marker use should be in a well ventilated room. On the higher end of disposable pens you have the Rapidoliner which is refillable. And the Rapidograph is the closest a tech pen gets to a traditional crowquill dip pen or the legendary Winsor-Newton Series 7 Sable brush.

Running Windows apps on Mac OS X without Windows

norights — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:29:15 +0000

So in an earlier post I mentioned ways to play around with different OSes on OS X. If you want to run Windows apps but don’t want to pay for a copy of Windows, you could install ReactOS. But what if you only want to run one app? Codeweavers have an interesting product called Crossover, but that costs money. However the project it’s built up from, Darwine, is totally free. Darwine is a special port of Wine specifically for OS X. Linux users have been using Wine to run Windows apps for years. Since I’m using Leopard on an Intel machine, I used this build I found online. I’m not sure about PowerPC users, but you might have luck with older versions. Installation was a little confusing until I deleted some faulty preferences and reinstalled. It’s still not as smooth as booting into Windows straight up, but for a free solution it’s very nice. And there’s no issues with capturing mouse/keyboard actions from the host OS and sending them to the guest OS like in virtual machines I’ve tried.

Image file types and resolutions - Now with Color Formats!

norights — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:42:36 +0000

When saving images to the web, there’s a number of things to keep in mind. File size is dependent on several factors - resolution, document size, file type, compression levels, and number of colors used. If you’re on Windows I recommend Xat.com’s image Optimizer because it lets you tinker with these factors and shows you how your changes impact file size as well as picture quality. I’m still on the lookout for a good Mac equivalent for myself. Resolution is the quality of the image in dots per inch. Images on the web are standard at 72 dpi because a screen can usually only show you up to 72 dots per inch of space. Print-quality documents are best at 300 dpi or higher. (You can get away with printing lower resolutions on a home printer but it’s not going to look great.) The lower resolution you have the bigger the hit you’ll take on quality. Usually 600 dpi is the highest quality you’ll need to go to unless you’re doing something on a monumental scale. Resolutions of 900-1200 dpi are not unheard of but they’re extremely rare because of how much disk space it takes to store them and the fact that most printers don’t have the equipment to print something with that much detail. Remember you can always lower an image’s resolution later but increasing it will usually result in quality loss unless you’re dealing with vector files. If you drop an image of a lower resolution into a document of a higher resolution it will print smaller. Document size is the actual size of your image. In print resolutions it’s usually shown in dimensions by inches and dpi. (i.e. 8.5 x 11″ at 600 dpi is a larger file than 8.5 x 11″ at 300 dpi, even though they print to the same size. You could always use feet instead of inches here or the metric system, depending on what you’re used to. Dropping the 300 dpi image into the 600 dpi file will cause it to become smaller than 8.5 x 11″ because now it demands more dots per inch than the image holds.) Web graphics are mostly described in pixel dimensions. (i.e. 1024 pixels by 768 is a standard screen display size.) If your viewer is looking at a page on a monitor set for 1024 x 768 then they aren’t going to see any images bigger than that without scrolling. It’s also best to resize your images to fit a particular screen size rather than having the HTML on your page resize them when a viewer surfs to your site. The browser is still forced to load the full sized file before displaying it, lengthening load time, and some browsers can ruin the quality of your images by resizing them. A quick note on types of images. Bitmap graphics are like mosaics. On the web it’s pixels that form a picture. In print it’s a series of dots. You can’t resize them without basically enlarging these blocks. Vector graphics, on the other hand, are mathematical equations. They save lines as curves and percentages. So you can resize a vector image to be smaller or larger without any loss in quality. This format is also considerably smaller when saving than bitmap. The downside is most vector programs (Or draw programs, since you’re effectively drawing lines and shapes. Bitmap programs are typically considered paint programs. So Flash would be a draw program and Photoshop would be a paint program.) will change the contour of your line depending on smoothness settings. Erasing can also be iffy, because different programs will round out the curve of the line rather than simply chop off what you remove. It’s best to work in vector and then save it to some other format when posting to the web. Flash filetypes like .FLA are fairly well supported by most browsers but a number of people don’t install the plugin. Don’t expect the viewer to download/install/change things just to view your site.File type is the actual extension at the end of the file name. Each format works better for different needs. If you’re saving for print (As is recommended before resizing files for the web.) Bitmap, (.BMP) TIFF, (.TIF) and TARGA (.TGA) files are standard because they’re generally uncompressed and lossless formats. TIFF will save layers to an image, which is handy if you’re saving from a program like Photoshop or Painter. It’s best used for saving black and white line art for reproduction. TARGA is often used in sequences for animation. I recommend against saving in Bitmap because it can have issues when going between computers. For web use, JPEG, GIF, and PNG are supported by most browsers. JPEG is a lossy format in that it degrades the image the more you compress it. The more compression you have the smaller your file size is going to be. If you’re working with blurs and photographic colors the human eye usually can’t detect too much of a difference as long as the compression is fairly low. Turn it too high and you’ll begin seeing artifacts in your image. GIF and PNG both save individual colors. The number of colors can impact file size and quality as well. Less colors obviously take up less space. A blur will usually look speckled if the pallet doesn’t have enough colors. These types are best used for straight black and white line art with flat colors. They also support transparency should you want to overlay an image and have some of the original background visible. (Remember some browsers, like IE, have trouble rendering transparency properly.) GIF is also popular for animated graphics though PNG can be used similarly. Also remember when working with color that print graphics should be done in CMYK mode. RGB color is usually more saturated and suited for displaying on monitors. If you try printing from RGB colors you may find the actual colors that come out aren’t true and don’t match the ones you thought you put into your image.

Playing around with emulation and virtualization

norights — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:09:15 +0000

So the other night I got bored and looked into playing with different OSes on my Mac Pro. Now of course you can dual boot with Boot Camp but I don’t wanna partition my drive since I don’t plan on keeping the installs around. I could run something like Parallels or VMWare Fusion but those cost money. I actually want to have another OS sitting on my machine instead of just running one app so CrossOver is out. Wine is kind of confusing. So I try out two programs I’ve read about: Q and VirtualBox. Q is a port of the QEMU emulator. It’s lightweight and you can emulate a decent amount of hardware configurations with it. It’s a little buggy but if you just want to test out another OS it’s nice. VirtualBox is a little more thorough in the setup. There’s more to configure but it also leads to a more stable install. The guest OSes load faster with this one.I don’t have a copy of Windows sitting around so I opt for the next best thing - ReactOS. This Open Source Operating System supports Windows drivers and runs a good number of applications. It’ll be fun to try should I miss that occasional Windows app. I also decide to test out a version Ubuntu. Why? Because it’s stable, Open Source, popular, and I figure I should at least check Linux out. I’ll test out other OSes as I find them, should they give me a decent disk image to test. I’ve had a few problems with using these apps, mostly do to mouse clicking and capturing things from the host computer and sending them to the guest OS. But for free programs I can’t complain too much. It’s really nice to be able to install another Operating System on your machine and then remove it like nothing ever happened should you find you don’t like it.

Welcome to my new blog

norights — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:15:59 +0000

My degree is in commercial art, but I also have a good understanding of writing, music, and technical info on both Windows and Mac. I sort of dabble in anything that interests me, researching and studying it for a bit before posting summations. I’ll be sharing links, featuring tutorials on how to do things, and basically any other useful bits I can get out.

How to Handle Remote Tech Support

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:30:00 GMT

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VMware and Parallels for Virtual Machines

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

It doesn't matter if you're running on Windows or Mac OS X - every power user needs either Parallels or VMware (or both). There's never been an easier way to test software without destroying your primary operating system's stability. Think of how many times you wish you could press a 'reverse' button on your computer. Plus, there's no easier way to try new Linux distributions - see what all the fuss is about. Run Windows in OS X, run Linux in Windows, but the best way to do either is with VMware and/or Parallels.

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chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:56:13 GMT

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