A self portrait of me in my comfy work gear. It’s done in pen and wash on a scrap or re-cycled printer paper.
A bit of an antidote to my usual digital work and a reminder to get in touch with my messy side. (It is also a reminder that knitted picture frames are more bother than they are worth.)

A cartoon duo doomed to failure in this cynical digital age. (Actually, I’m a little worried about the kind of traffic I’m going to get by even putting ‘Bear’ and ‘Beaver’ on the same web page.)

The Summer is ending  and Halloween approaches. The veil between this world and the next is wearing thin and bobbly. It is a time when horrors from the other side poke their noses into our affairs and small children roam the streets extorting sugar based food stuffs.

The Pumpkin Cat eats children like that!

This would make some interesting sandwiches.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Elephant roller skating rough

I photographed the doodle on my phone and loaded it into  Xara Xtreme. Once there things got quite a bit more colourful.

The final coloured Elephant on roller skates

Moody

Ah Autumn. The leaves fall from the trees, the nights draw in, and young ladies in halloween costume stand too close to electric radiators.

A bold use of colour and more importantly darkness, two things that paying clients seem to be adverse to.

A Dragon waves it's tongue

Xara Xtreme has updated to version 5…….

Like a lot of upgrades nowadays it was hardly worth the bother. Companies seem to focus on new users (Read Hobbyists) so long term niggles and bugs are ignored because users have found ways to put up with them and the don’t sound sexy in the sales blurb. On one level I can hardly blame them they are just trying to make a living.  But as a victim of shrinking budgets the only way I can get by is to work quicker. To me that means fewer clicks and sharper tools -  exactly what the software designers seem not to be delivering and that makes me very frustrated.

Deep Breath….

Case in point. I stupidly got all excited about the:

‘Improved ‘rapid sketching’ support for the Freehand Tool.’

The first real drawing tool in about 10 years? Not really. All it does is to stop the line you are drawing connecting to the previous one by turning the auto join feature off for half a second. Well that is what it should do but because the auto connection settings default to 12 pixels it doesn’t work if you draw that close to the previous line. It also makes life hell because if you do want to re-draw a section of you line you have to wait half a second before you are able to. This really ruins your flow and is not at all rapid. I can’t really believe that this was tested by anyone who actually draws with a stylus.

All is not lost however. A couple of users have created a little app called XaReg which allows the user to monkey with Xara’s registry settings and get the tool a bit more rapid. I have turned the end hit detect down to 1 from 12 and turned the auto join to 75 milliseconds from 250 and turned on auto deselect on so I don’t get control points after drawing.  A usable tool- Hurrah! ( Though why these settings aren’t available from the main app I’ll never know.)

The Dragon above was done to test this tool, previously I’d have to press the escape key between drawing every scale. Now thanks to XaReg life is indeed a little nicer.

In my opinion the best ever vector drawing tools are still Expression 3.3 which is no longer being developed. (You can find it FREE from Microsoft if you dig around – Not Expression Design which is a filleted version for Microsoft’s web design suite and therefore crime of the century) I think Expression came out in 200o and it is amazing that no-one has come close since.

Enough ranting – I’m off to draw stuff

…Time passes and I calm a little.  Just to clarify for the record. Xara Xtreme Pro is the best vector software out there but Expression does have better freehand brushes.

A hungry mouse gets the cheese

The main reason for starting this blog was to encourage me to do my own stuff. Trouble is, after a long day of Illustrating to deadlines the creative juices are a bit thin. First thing in the morning is not good either as I’m far too worried about getting the paying work done to relax into my own drawing.
I’m beginning to think that this self creation lark is going to take quite a bit of mental muscle that is going to have to be built up over time. To that end I’m off to Mothercare to get one of those mind gyms for newborns. In the meantime here is a picture of a very simple plan put effortlessly into action by a well fed mouse.