Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

I have certainly used InDesign to package finished comics projects, but since it’s primarily a page layout tool, I have never seen it used for any sort of drawing. In this video Gareth Hinds shows how he uses InDesign’s vector pencil tool to do the rough sketching and layouts for his comic book adaptation of The Odyssey.

This is the first in a series of videos for which he plans to share the other steps in his comic-making process.

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.

(via swissmiss)

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.

via Garth’s Twitter

Yesterday I attended a free, day long Adobe seminar/sales pitch. They are a really efficient way to get up to speed on the new software, get tips,get tech support, bitch directly at the reps about bugs and features, and maybe win something. I missed CS2 while I was in school, so I have some major catching up to do. Actually, everyone has some major catching up to do, with CS3. You’ve probably already heard all the buzz about it being the biggest upgrade ever, bla bla bla. Well, this time the buzz is true. Now that they’ve added in Dreamweaver and Flash and a billion other things, and made Photoshop the grand central station of them all, the world just ain’t the same. I predict our industry (I mean anything graphically creative) is about to undergo a huge jump in look, feel, efficiency, and impact because of this. I’m not here to plug Adobe, so that’s all I’m going to say, not that opinions matter since we have few alternatives to Adobe any more. Personally, I was just pleased to see Illustrator pen tool capability in Flash.

I will mention though that I get a little big-picture worried about the digital divide, now that the software is getting so expensive and complicated that only full-time users will be able to keep up.

Now for some fun: Adobe began this colour-swatch exchange thing a while ago, called Kuler. For those who love mixing paint and choosing colours, it’s addictive. You can dynamically download colour schemes from the site from within CS and apply them to your work in progress. I only wish they had made the site background colour a neutral grey, to see the colours more accurately.

Sure Adobe finally released Adobe CS3, but this video proves that even the simplest pieces of software can yield great results.

CNET reports that Adobe Systems is releasing a free, ad-supported version of Photoshop online within six months.

“We are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,” said Adobe CEO, Bruce Chizen.

It looks like it’s high noon for online image editing – and it’s the illustrators and visual creatives who stand to benefit the most. I can’t count the times I’ve been on a remote terminal without Photoshop and felt completely useless as I tried to resize my image in MS Paint or whatever was at hand.

[Link] via TechCrunch

Most creative professionals, when asked what piece of software they use most, will most likely say Adobe suite of applications. But for students and non-professionals, Adobe’s pricetags can be quite intimidating. Luckily, there are a few free/cheap alternatives.

Most prominent is the GIMP, a powerful and totally free, open source alternative to Photoshop that is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X:

If you find the GIMP intimidating, another open source image editing program, based on the GIMP is available called Seashore, which is available only for Mac OS X:

Finally, Wouldja Draw is a simple vector drawing application for Mac OS X. It’s not free, and looks rather limited in its functionality, but at $29.95 (there is a free demo) it sure beats the $500 sticker price of Adobe Illustrator if you only need to create the occasional simple vector images:

UPDATE:
Readers in the comments section point out some other free/cheap alternatives:
Inkscape is a free vector graphic program that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Xara is a competetively-priced alternative as well (for Windows).