Not another one of these?! No no, wait. Hear me out. For like 20 years, I’ve been using Adobe Illustrator as my main finishing tool. Up through CS5, I was happy with the product. It’s my go-to, everyday art tool, right after ink and paper. I can output at any DPI I need, even after the fact with no loss of clarity and it gives me really fine control. The problem is, Adobe got kind of greedy. Where once you could by the most recent update for $150, and it would last you a few years, now they want $20 a month for the same program. That’s $240 a year and as a hobbyist, that’s WAY too much money. Problem is, Adobe hasn’t exactly been challenged in the vector market up til now. The image above was not made with Illustrator (except for the live trace feature), it was made with Affinity Designer, a program made to work natively on the Mac, another huge bonus. The other big bonus is that it’s only $50 period. Ever. Does it do everything Illustrator does? No, but it’s getting damned close and it can do some things AI can’t. While the workflow is very different than what I’m used to, I think I can make this work for what I do and I’m going to try. The subscription model for software sucks. I’ve always bought my software, I never pirated it. I don’t make much off my work, but I still try here and there. I hope that they’ll continue to add features, perhaps even, finally, live trace so I can say goodbye to AI completely. The above image isn’t that interesting, but the fact that I could get the same result with a program other than Illustrator might mean a huge deal to those of us who can’t or won’t afford Adobe’s subscriptions.

Worked on this a bit more. Trimmed the edges, added some highlights to the background so that there's a kind of arrow pointing to the fox if you squint. Also added some shadowing to him as well. Moved the fox further into the background, which allowed me to show the whole figure and also pushed him a little further into the composition. Will likely try and have a test print made and see how this looks before utter final.

Nearly done. There are just some final tweaks to do on this one, mostly to do with the lighting in general and shadows on the fox. This print came together much more quickly than was the image from the restaurant, which tells me that there was something wrong with that one. Part of that has to do with the character. He's a lot more stylized than he was in Tokyo. Yet that image works as well. I think things were just too stiff in the restaurant one. I should revisit it, trying to do with that one as I did with this. Thinking I might try and do one of Digby in a supermarket. I like all the details, the industrial lighting. We'll have to see. Once the tweaks are done, I'll order a full size print of this. Seems there are some friends who actually want one of this, mostly because they're ex-Picnic employees. Glad to have any interest, ever.

Two WIP versions of the current 'print.' I'm getting there. I think, perhaps I've captured the feeling of the Picnic at the very least. For me, it's at least, if not more important that the character reading in it. I wonder if there's a kind of career in this...

Haven't posted in a while due to illness. I'm really slowing down which bothers me. But today I worked quite a few hours on these. This is meant to be the next print in a series or something like that. The end result is meant to be something about 16x20, or in this case, 20x16. The print will be called, "The Comic Store," and is based, as mentioned last post, in my own alma mater, The Picnic. I changed Digby's style to one that's far more stylized as it felt more like what I wanted to do. Digby himself is already kind of stylized, but I wanted to take him further. I -think- I'm going to keep the lines for the background as well, as it adds an overall shabbiness that I want to capture from the photo. Everything is meant to feel lived in, moreso than the last print. These things take a really long time to do, but there's something really satisfying about it, too. Didn't want to make the covers of the books too specific; like the city of Tamino, and Lucco, I didn't want them to be any particular comics, the shop, really to have to be in any specific place. Still, coloring's going to be a bear. Fun, but a bear.

Haven't updated or drawn anything in a couple weeks. I've been sick and that saps the energy from me to draw anything. I was also in Boston a couple weeks before that which means I don't draw anything, either. While there, I took some photos and found one that would make, what I thought was a decent backdrop to a potential print candidate. My old stomping grounds and longest held job was the Million Year Picnic. After the image of the fox and monkey in the alley, I thought about doing some other print-worthy images. I tried to do one inside a favorite restaurant but something wasn't gelling for me. Think it was the figures. So now I started this. The top image is the panoramic I shot there and the following are two versions of Digby I want to put in there. The lowest is the most recent and I think the better of the two. Now comes the long process of working on the background.