Wired 2011 Together 2011 painting

A week or so ago I was invited by Wacom to paint a picture live at the Wired 2011 Together event. With only few short days I was advised to deliver something simple so I knocked a quick portrait together - saving the image halfway through so I could paint the image to a finished stage at the event.

So Wacom tablet (Intuos) and Photoshop CS5:-

Medical Illustration

I spoke recently at the Institute of Medical Illustrators conference about drawing and painting with a Wacom tablet, knowing I have no work of any kind that would relate to a scientific audience (!?) I set about to create a quick illustration of the human heart to present at the workshop - I rarely get to just sit and draw something for the sole purpose of well.. drawing.

Pre-production paintings for unreleased Oakenfold project

These are some 16 x 9 concept paintings for an unreleased Paul Oakenfold video project, painted in Photoshop CS5 with a Wacom graphics tablet. I use images like this to guide colour-keys and focus scenes I feel are important to capture in a production. The images in the desert are more colour keys than concept art but the first image I wanted to shoot and splice into the beginning of a show to increase the drama of the opening.

The iPad 2 and Sketchbook Pro for sketching..

I am loving drawing on my iPad 2 - I had the first iPad for a while on loan but I never got round to actually picking up many apps for it - this time round I'm using it for almost all my client facing project planning and presentation - the next set of images i'm creating on it are storyboards, as with the first edition its great to pop out of your bag and start sketching..

I made myself a stylus or Sketchbook Pro out of a roll of anti-staic film jammed into a biro but its not as responsive as I would have hoped.. I plan to pick up a proper stylus in the next week or so. The multiple use aspect of the iPad is what is most appealing to me I think - the combination of video editing, drawing and photo editing along with books, comic books (guilty pleasure) and navigation with an external GPS unit has pushed me to use my iPad for all my travel computing (unless a larger job requires a laptop Final Cut editing suite) I will try and post some of my conceptual storyboards and sketches in the next few weeks..

Meantime here is a quick one I knocked out on a saturday afternoon - finger and home-made stylus. I created this to prove a point to a friend of mine - a fellow illustrator - who was torn between picking up an iPad 2 and Sketchbook Pro or going full whack with a Macbook Pro, Photoshop and a Wacom. His criteria was to have a light portable solution for polishing up his pencil and ink sketches in the computer. For professional, highly polished output - the Macbook Pro / Wacom route is the way to go, I'm still keen to use the iPad for on the road work or rapid prototyping with a client in the room - I would be less keen to use it for final print work.. I love my Wacom tablet and I use it literally every day even in my corporate job.

As it happens my friend won a Macbook Air in a company competition so he's going to try and cram Photoshop on it to use with a Wacom tablet - I will be intrigued to see how he gets on..

Painting on the iPad

I have had the opportunity recently to experiment with the Sketchbook Pro application on the iPad:







A far cry from the Wacom tablet and Photoshop combination I'm used to but potentially an interesting tool. Sketchbook Pro has layers, a full colour wheel and a variety of brush presets to play with, I managed a quick sketch of a diver (purely for academic purposes) and found the painting tools to be quite powerful, the screen is a great size and space for simple illustrations but drawing with my fingertip drove me nuts after about half an hour - I hear there are now stylus tools you can purchase that emulate the fingertip or even make your own:

DIY iPad stylus

In its current state this is no rival for a professional set up with an Intuos 4 and a copy of Photoshop,the accuracy with even homemade tools isn't precise enough for me and the lack of photo features mean I'm not going to be ditching my laptop on the go anytime soon, although its a nice idea that I could sketch a rough for a storyboard or an illustration on the train or in a plane with that great 10 hour battery life...

More CS5 Painting

Inspired by a creative mashup session yesterday (more on that later) I put another painting together in Photoshop CS5, the brush tools really are incredible with quick buttons on the menu to force complete control over to a Wacom tablet, I have been a big user of tablets for about 10 years now, working my way through the Intuos range, with a slight detour into a wireless Graphire at my time at Apple (awesome for presentations) and cannot recommend them more for digital creatives, the fluidity of a pen interface cannot be matched in photographic, illustrative or even video work.
































This image started life as a few blocky colours on a page before being shaped into a coherent painting, I don't often remember to take stages pictures (when free hand painting I usually just draw on one layer..) but I did snap a before image:
































Plus a quick shot of the brush tool overlay - this accurately maps the positioning of the Wacom Stylus over the tablet and if you watch the screen closely while you work it allows you to see how your making brush strokes, coming from an analogue painting background - it was great to see my motions with a brush were the same in a digital environment.

iPhone to CS5 Workflow

I have been experimenting with the iPhone as part of my creative workflow - I already use a variety of applications to get interesting and creative results out of my iPhone photographs such as Photoshop Mobile and Shakeit Lite - and I wanted to see what the possibilities are for creating a full design using the iPhone as a launchpad.

My first iPhone app in this workflow is Adobe Ideas - a simple vector drawing tool for making notes on photos and creating sketches and proofs of ideas in note form. I'm also a big fan of Shakeit Lite and other 'effects' apps for the iPhone - the camera on a 3GS is not actually all that bad and performs very well in daylight. I really like to use it as a visual journal - I'm not going to take a Canon 1Ds MkIII with me everywhere all the time its simply too bulky. I have started to take a few of these 'digital polaroid' images every day with the intention of making a project out of it at some point.

I enclose below a simple workflow diagram for working with the iPhone and Photoshop CS5: