I’ve suffered from Photoshop and Illustrator crashes so many times I’ve often wondered why these applications don’t have any auto-save features. Sure, if you work with extremely large file sizes it can be resource- and time-intensive to be re-saving all the time, and I often flatten layers and perform any number of destructive actions that I may not want to commit to a full save. But it would be nice to have the option, y’know? I’d probably swear at my computer less if once in a blue moon, Photoshop piped up and said, “You haven’t saved in a while? You wanna do that now?”
Enter EverSave, a free app (for Macs only, I’m afraid) that does just that — saves your work in any application, on a timed schedule or at any time you switch between applications. And, just as importantly, there’s an option to have EverSave ask before each save. Yes, thank-you.
Here’s a cool video for the concept artists and industrial designers in the crowd. ILoveSketch is a 3D sketching system being developed at the University of Toronto described as an “as-natural-as-possible sketching system for creating 3D curve models”.
In this video, watch as Ray Frenden completes an illustration for a t-shirt. The video is real-time, with Ray’s live commentary, and clocks in at an astounding 2 hours or so. I didn’t have the time to watch all of it, but I managed to catch bits throughout its length (though Vimeo annoyingly doesn’t let one skip ahead without preloading the entire video) and it offers great insight into Ray’s working processes and philosophies.
Ray’s videos also offer a great glimpse at Manga Studio, the illustration software designed with comics creators in mind. I’ve been meaning to give Manga Studio a try, but the software, though Mac compatible, won’t run on Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS. Some Internet sleuthing seems to give the impression that there’s no plans for a patch or upgrade until the next version of the software is released. On Smith Micro’s site, they acknowledge the incompatibility, and suggest trying the feature-poor Debut edition of the application, but subsequently don’t offer any free trial downloads of anything but the incompatible Ex version.
A fun little advert/video that Saatchi Moscow created to turn more Russians on to Gmail.
I’m embarrassed to say I never realized the little red envelope in the Gmail logo was an ‘M’ before this. (An aside: why can’t Gmail’s amazing spam filter figure out that Cyrillic messages in North America are usually spam?)
This awesome new game brings your drawings to life. Draw a ball and watch it fall, draw an incline and watch the ball roll down. A demo version is available for download on the official site.
Looks like it’s based on this MIT software (watch the demo here) which everyone was blogging about last year.
It also looks like the game requires a tablet. Could be another fun way to use the Wacom Cintiq.
This is the first in a series of screencasts by illustrator Garth Bruner demonstrating the differences between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe’s acquired-and-now-discontinued Freehand. It’s a plea for Adobe to migrate and incorporate some of Freehand’s more intuitive features into Illustrator. Can’t wait to see more.
EDIT: Garth informs me that the videos will do more than just compare Illustrator to Freehand. He’ll be using several other applications as reference points in order to pinpoint some of Illustrator’s shortcomings.
Pfft… who needs a portable Cintiq when you’ve got a Nintendo DS. Colors! is a home-brewed painting application for the popular gaming device, and I found this image by user Harbadakus while browsing the online gallery of Colors! work.
She highlights the site’s terms regarding uploaded user content, particularly the clause that reads:
“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”
This month, Wacom releases the Wacom Cintiq 12WX – a “sketchbook” version of the critically-acclaimed Cintiq drawing tablet. Cintiqs are tablets with built-in LCD screens so you can draw directly on the image. This new 12WX model is only 26cm x 16cm and a full 8 kilograms lighter than its big-sister, the 21UX. In short, the new Cintiq is a lot more portable.
The Cintiq 12WX is now available in North America. And for those of you in Europe, I notice it’s also available on the Amazon.co.uk site, but apparently won’t ship before Christmas. If there are any reader reviews, please post in the comments! And a note to Wacom: We’d be happy to test-drive these things for you whenever you like.
Here’s a YouTube demo for the little beauty, so you can see it in action:
Aidan Chopra, the author of Google SketchUp for Dummies has an entire series of accompanying videos on YouTube that help show you how to use SketchUp, Google’s free 3D drawing program. I’ve tried SketchUp, but found it unintuitive, and these videos (and I’m sure the book, too) truly help. The program has the potential to be invaluable to illustrators and cartoonists, as it allows you to quickly (and cheaply!) create models to work from — especially of different views of imaginary interiors.
