I wasn’t expecting much, but I wasn’t impressed. It looks really good, but it involved yet more path work. In Illustrator, no less. I’m thinking that I’m gonna relegate Illustrator to lineart, and saving vector stuff for print, because Photoshop can’t save in a real vector format. Thanks, Adobe.

I’m actually doing art-ish stuff for a change. I just spend a few hours copying and pasting paths from Photoshop to Illustrator, pretty much rebuilding “muse” from the ground up. (You should see how it looks if I just import. There’s a crap ton of layers, and none of the vector layers import as objects, thank you very much Adobe. And this is CS2, I thought when they announced Smart Objects that Photoshop wouldn’t be all gimped out when it comes to vector art, what happened?)

I’m listening to No Holds Barred on NHB right now, and I think some of Damon’s vitriol is rubbing off on me. By the way, if you, due to some debilitating illness, use iTunes as your music player, NHB is on the Radio tab, under Spoken Word. Give it a listen, and for the love of god get a better media player.¹

Anyhow, the reason I’m doing all this crap is to try out Gradient Mesh, which seems like a really fun tool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show for my trouble later tonight, as well as my thoughts on Illustrator. Thus far: half the stuff that’s giving me trouble is just because it’s handled differently than Photoshop at a fundamental level. The other half is due to Illustrator being fucking backwards. The only way I’ve found to set a swatch is by applying that color to an object. Stuff that was second nature in Photoshop four generations ago, like right-clicking on a layer, are missing. And if you set a custom color for the layer (the color the path is rendered in, not the fill or stroke colors), it uses the Windows color picker. I can’t even use the eyedropper to grab a color. That is inexcusable, but the layer’s color isn’t especially important anyhow, you don’t really need to bother changing it from the default in the first place.

One thing that threw me was the New Document dialogue. I went nuts trying to find the DPI setting. Vector art is resolution-independent, so an Illustrator document has no DPI, for all intents and purposes. I feel dumb for not realizing this sooner.

One thing that shows promise is the brush tool. It works pretty much the same as the equivalent in Photoshop, except it’s vector-based. Illustrator can smooth the stroke out a bit, and if need be I can modify the path manually, so it oughta be useful for inking via tablet, because god knows my tablet work is sloppy.

¹ Nothing against iTunes, it’s great for buying or ripping music, but it’s second only to Windows Media Player² in being overbloated and underpowered as a media player.
² Not to be confused with Media Player Classic, a great barebones video player. Pretty worthless for music, though.

Ugh. My sister has a new computer, care of her man-slave, my roommate. So I got to play “get this thing set up properly” while listening to wrestling. Woo.

I have been drawing, but I’m not gonna post it yet. I make it my policy to post what I’ve worked on, regardless of how much work it needs, but this one needs a lot of touchups to the rough scketch before I’m posting it. Besides, it’s s’posed to be a surprise. And I must be really tired, because I seem to be correcting a typo every third word I type.

In other news, this is just plain wrong.

I cannot ever resist the urge to make a Highlander joke when referring to Scott McCloud. So I went to see Ghostrider again last night¹ down at the Sixteenth Street Mall near LoDo. This is a bad thing where my cash is concerned, because the theatre is next door to a Barnes and Noble. A bit more expensive than Amazon, but for some reason I just love going to bookstores. $77 later, I have volume 2 of Trigun, volume 3 of Trigun Maximum², Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, volume 2 of Orphen (sensing a pattern here) and Making Comics by Scott McCloud. But no Westword, every goddamn box I hit was out. The drunk guys on the light rail had one, but not me.³ Anyhow, I checked out the first couple of pages of Making Comics and it looks pretty good so far. McCloud’s drawing himself older in this one, it’s a nice touch. But I’m pretty pleased so far, it seems to be informative and worth the money, in the vein of Understanding Comics, thank god. Scott, if you somehow find this, you can have my copy of Reinventing Comics. Take it. But I want my fucking $22 back, you bastard.

I’m gonna try and get some shit drawn later on, but right now, breakfast.

Also, I already finished volume 2 of Trigun, and it’s very, very nice. But don’t tell my pill failure⁴ sister that I have it or I’ll never get it back.

¹ Still not bad, but it loses something with repeated viewings
² Last time I went buying, they didn’t have volume two, but they did have the first two volumes of the sequel.
³ They were calling the sex lines advertised on the back page. I’ve never been that drunk myself, but I was very jealous.
⁴ Honest to god, my mom forgot her pill. I forget what failed for them to have me, but I bet something ruptured along the way.

You know what sounds fun? Making a PHP version of one of the games I wrote for the Wizard. Maybe even try to figure out Flash enough to make a downloadable version. (Or javascript, that’d work too I guess.)

I think I’ll do that tonight.

Right after I’m done rereading Girly. Don’t know why I stopped reading that one…

Didn’t get a damn thing done today. Spent the day screwing around, and the evening watching Dane Cook’s Tourgasm. It’s freakin’ funny as hell, especially the show clips in episode 2.

I’ll try and get something done tomorrow I guess.

EDIT: The preview version is no longer there, as the finished version at starfyre.brimzero.net is now available.

Finally got this done. Not very complex, or jaw-dropping, but it works, and the markup is (hopefully) really easy for Starfyre to edit because he doesn’t know any HTML. It’s available at brimzero.net/starfyre, and at some point it ought to go up at his webspace as well.

They just quoted Mitch Hedberg. How did I live without this shit?

…to my last post: I just tuned into NHB and they were playing Mindless Self Indulgence. This is possibly the best talk radio station on the internet.

I spent a lot of time dicking around with cell shading and using the Wacom for kinda watercolor-ish look, but that shit fell flat as always so I went back to the well with the soft shading. At least it looks pretty cool, what little I got done.

Odd note: “shading 2″ is the active layer. For the skin I use two or three separate layers for shading, and another for highlights. I organize the various elements (skin, hair, clothing, etc.) into groups (the little folder icon in the layers palette) to help preserve my sanity. I know this information has rocked your world.

Also, No Holds Barred Radio is disturbing and funny, not necessarily in that order.