The Girl...

Hand drawn, inked using a manuscript mapping nib, and a brush. I'll edit this post tomorrow with a version inked using OpenCanvas...
... and here it is! Changed the hand slightly, and made some other mods. Also made a mistake under the arm, which I'll have to correct. Not sure which one is best though!


The last one is Xara Xtreme. Interestingly, both the digital ones took 45 minutes to ink.

The new "ME"

New version of my avatar, drawn digitally using OpenCanvas!

Sketching again...

Just a few quick sketches I did this lunchtime - I'm slowly improving...:)

Inking, pens and all that jazz...

Been doing a lot of thinking about inking lately. I've tried a multitude of implements to ink my cartoons over the past year, trying to find my favourites, and I've come to some unusual conclusions...

• Use what makes your cartoons look great
• Use what feels right

With this is mind, here is the top 5 inking implements for me...

1. Fountain Pentel. Without a doubt the most used pen in my box. It's not permanent, and I can't use it for cartoons that I colour traditionally, as it's not waterproof, but (and it's a very big but) it gives the most wonderful line. It's flexible point can give thick or thin lines, and it's just so expressive. Also available as the Stylo or Tradio, although the standard Fountain has the most expressive point. My all time favourite!
2. Faber Castell PITT pens. Wonderful pens, filled with permanent indian ink, and available in many colours and point sizes. My favourites are the M & F sizes. The B (Brush) option is one of the best available, although it doesn't hold it's point for long. The only disappointment in the range is the S tip (superfine) - it's too soft, and bends too easily.
3. Pilot DR Pens. Another brand of technical pen that's permanent and lightfast. These may be replaced in my arsenal soon by the Staedlter equivelent, as I find the barrel a bit chunky...
4. Copic Sketch Marker. Great for large black areas, but bleeds through the paper. may be replaced by Sharpies soon...
5. Copic Multiliner BS. Another technical pen, but refillable by cartridge. I've only tried the BS (Brush) option in these, which is similar to the Faber "B", but slightly more robust (saying that, when it goes mushy, it's VERY mushy...)

Soon to be tried - Tombow ABT dual tip pens, Sharpie Dual Tips and Staedler Pigment Liners.

Technical Pens and White Ink...

More of an exercise this one. The main robot is with Marsmatic technical pens, the heads & effects are with a Fountain Pentel. Not sure which ones I prefer at this point...


Very quick drawing, using the Marsmatics again (0.5 & 0.7) as well as a 0.5 with white ink for corrections. Not sure if it's the paper I'm using, but sometimes the Marsmatics give me a bad line...

More brushwork - Bar

Did this quickly at lunch today. This is ALL brush, and I'm quite pleased with it (my drawing still needs to get better - Teeah & Crash's arms are a bit too long and thin). Hopefully, If I get a few spare minutes, I'll colour it...

Space Ace

Very quick piccie I did this lunchtime, using a brush & india ink for the drawing, markers for colour (note to self - do the swoosh lines idiot!)

Revelations...

Today I had a revelation - I actually prefer inking with a brush! I've been trying for a few days to ink with both pen and brush, and today I was getting frustrated inking a piece with a dip pen. The pen was scratchy, I couldn't pull the lines I wanted, etc... So this lunchtime, I switched to a brush, and immediately felt happier! I started to pull good lines (not great, I've still got some practice to do), but the end result was better than I hoped - I'll post it later...

Appraisals....

Just a quick cartoon for my mate Chris, who's just gone through the appraisal process - hope you like it mate!

Farewell Truespace

Today it was announced that Truespace, one of the premier 3D modelling packages in history, has been dropped (with no provision for appeal) by Microsoft because of financial reasons. Truespace has been around for 25 years, and featured a ground breaking interface (which you either loved or hated) together with exceptional modelling & animation tools, and all for a very good price.

Since Calligari (the company that developed Truespace) was bought by Microsoft, we all knew it was just a matter of time before something like this happened. Microsoft's record in software acquisitions has been awful - apart from a few success stories, much of what they have bought has lead to many recognized products fading into the ether: Truespace is just the latest casualty.

Truespace was a industry leader at one time, now it has been consigned to the annals of history. To all those who worked so hard at Calligari, you have my sympathies. Farewell my friend, I shall not forget you...

Sendmail - "user open" timeouts...

Hello again - two posts in one day - my aren't you the lucky ones!

As you're all aware, as well as cartoons, I'm a I.T. guy, and part of my job involves looking after Sendmail installations. Recently, I came across a problem which although is well known, no real answer has ever been given that I could find. In the hope of helping others who have had the same problem, here are the details...

There are lots of posts on the net, regarding sendmail creating lot's of connections which, when examined using ps, have the phrase "user open". If there are too many of these connections, sendmail can start rejecting connections, effectively giving you a sort of denial of service attack.

These connections stay open, because the smtp conversation has halted, and sendmail is waiting to timeout these connections. Part one of your fix for this condition, is to look at the SMTP conversation timeouts in the sendmail.mc, and set them to be something useful (the defaults are FAR TOO LONG) - 30 seconds is usually long enough. See this post...

Once your timeouts are more reasonable, start looking at your queue processing - specifically, how often do you process your queue? The default in some installations is as low as 5 minutes. This is OK, provided you have a small queue with only a few failing messages in it. Once you get to a large queue of failed messages (say 400), problems start to occur. Imagine your timeouts are set to 2 minutes. If each of your 400 messages takes 2 minutes to time out, it will take you up to 800 minutes to process the entire queue - fine, but if you're processing the queue every 5 minutes (and starting a new process each time) you'll eventually run out of connections...

The secret therefore, is to lower your timeout limits to sensible values, and process your queue less. In my case, I changed the queue processing to run every 20 minutes, which, when combined with sensible timeouts, dropped my queue processing time down, and kept my connections under control.

I hope this helps someone get out of a jam!

A new Doctor Who monster?

Not quite sure where I got the idea for this cartoon - me and my warped mind again! Hope you like it...

Inkscape thoughts

Some interesting points about Inkscape have come to light whilst I've been testing today...

• Pressure sensitive tablets can have unusual affects. Whilst redoing "Crash", I decided to try some thicker lines using the tablet, only to find that although I did get thicker lines, the ends of the lines were untidy, compared to normal (almost as if the caps were having extra nodes put in place). For inking purposes, this is annoying - I'd rather have a smooth smart line than a thickening line that had messy ends. For the majority of inking then, it's better to turn off the pressure sensitivity for the calligraphy tool, and rely on the "thinning" parameters, or tweak the paths later...
• The above is especially noticeable inking circles!

Inkscape Inking Test

As promised, here is the Inkscape inking comparison. I created a cartoon of Teeah & Crash just for this. Here is the Inkscape version...
And here is the hand inked version (ignore the pencil lines of the dialog in this one...)

An interesting experiment, and here are my findings....

• The initial sketch and ink drawing took an hour - the Inkscape inks took 45 mins, so both methods are comparable.
• The shading in the Inkscape drawing is not at subtle - You can't get the really thin strokes you need for this in Inkscape.
• The Inkscape drawing is good, but it lacks a bit of character. The drawing can appear "heavy handed".
• The Ink drawing seems "punchier" - this could just be that the outline is thicker.
• The Ink drawing has more character - is this because it has more "neuances" that just don't exist in the Inkscape version?

I think at present, I'll stick with manual inking, although I need a better "white-out" system... :)

UPDATE:
Here is another Inkscape version - I've changed a couple of things, most notably by using thinning lines with the calligraphy pen, as well as thickening lines. I've also changed the shading by using the tweak tool to roughen, and then shrink the paths. I think it looks better :)

Inkscape Test....

No, this is not deja vu, but you have seen this image before. This lunchtime, I wanted to se just how good Inkscape was at inking using default settings. I've used a previous picture of Crash & Teeah as the basis, but I've just used the Calligraphy Pen with default thinning settings for the inking - no thickening with the tweak tool as yet.

All in all, it took about 45 minutes - not too shabby. The pen widths here are mainly 2, with 1 for fine lines, but I may have to ink at higher resolutions with thicker lines, as these widths seem hard to control (perhaps 3 with 1...)

I have to remind myself here, that the initial drawing was not brilliant! The comparison of the inks however, looks promising...

UPDATE: The thinning option can be made negative, which means if you go faster you get thicker lines - could I just have found inking nervana?

The Boxer

Just a quick cartoon - not a gag cartoon this time, but more of an attempt to draw a particular character. When deciding on my lunchtime cartoons, I sometimes use a randomizer to give me ideas - this time, the randomizer came up with a boxer - hence the picture. I'm a lot happier with this cartoon than the previous one, as the colours come across better. I'm buying myself some more markers today, so we'll see how these work on Monday...

The diver

My latest cartoon - again coloured using the Peter Cocker technique - note to self, wet the paper especially for the background. For reference, here is the before and after versions :)

I'll have to remember that my "subtle" colouring can get lost in the scanning process - you can't see it here, but there are shadows underneath the protagonists!

Da name is Bull...

More work with my markers, and some new calligraphy pens - I really need to move to card though, as this paper crinkles!

Comedian

I said I was working on something didn't I?
My first attempt using a new colouring method (no computers here, except for the scan) based on the methods of Peter Cocker - YouTube web cartoonist. You can find him at http://www.youtube.com/user/WEBCARTOONIST

Notes to self - 1. Noodlers ink can smudge when the pencil is rubbed erased (that's why some areas seem very dirty) - either let it dry fully or 2. switch to another pen!

sorry for the delays folks...

... but I'm currently trying some new colouring / inking ideas. Hopefully, you'll see the results here very soon. I haven't forgotten about The Greebles, but it may be put on a back burner for a while while I concentrate on another idea that shows more promise - more about this later.

Keeeepppp Dancing!