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.

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..

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.

Russian Dolls

Following on from my last post on painting tools for Photoshop CS5, I have been designing some Russian dolls as templates to use for a real world creative project I'm working on. In the markets of Moscow you an buy 'blank' unpainted dolls to be painted with acrylic or poster paint - some come with the line work of the traditional doll but I wanted to start from a plain wood background and design my own doll - So far I have designed two layers to the doll using a mixture of Photoshop and the new Illustrator CS5 - illustrator has a nice feature for textured brushes that can be painted within a shape - this makes intricate design work with the unpredictable nature of brush control that much closer to working with pixel based paint in Photoshop.

I Hate Televison

By which I mean broadcast television, I hate being told what to watch and it all being rubbish reality TV bullshit, especially when there are better ways to watch the things I actually am interested in: (although must admit I rarely use them)

BBC iPlayer
Demand 5
4 on demand

The list goes on... so trash your TV!

Abstract minimalism

I'm working on a sketchbook, something I will add a mixture of photo, illustration and design content too and deliver as a sort of Flash interactive booklet in a post that can be clicked through and explored.

While I find time to build this I have dropped a few pages into a Photobucket account, I'm usually all about Flickr but sometime's you just need somewhere to stick stuff, no frills just an easy access image gallery.

Although my work is usually pretty intricate I actually quite enjoy minimalism, I'm putting a series of minimalist landscapes together to complement a photography project (Link) and these sketches help me get my brain in the right mood for it.