Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

So this drawing has little meaning. The first panel is nothing but a silly caption and the lines. The second is the vanishing point and then an OK Superman (more movie than comic book looking) flying away from some exploding vanishing point. The "Meanwhile..." was just me testing out how hard it is to deal with text and how hard it is to install a font (like Blambot's Digitstrip) on Linux (that part was easy). The full size image is here.

I bought a pen/stylus for my laptop. I can get Linux to recognize it, but haven't figured out how to get it to work with Windows in a VM yet. Unfortunately, that means I can't use the pen with Photoshop or Illustrator. However, the GIMP and Krita do recognize it. I had tried using Kritia a few years ago and it did not work well. I've used the GIMP before and it's fine for simple things, but it's no Photoshop and provides none of Illustrator's capabilities. I decided to try Krita again to see what's changed.

First, it does work. I wanted to play with some of the "assisstants", like the rulers and perspective tools. The perspective tool looks pretty cool, but first I tried the parallel ruler which allows the user to draw lots of paralle lines. I did a bunch and thought it looked cool, like some sort of Matrix-y kind of thing. Then I tried the vanishing point tool, which allows the user to draw lines that always point to the (if there's only one) vanishing point. Pretty simple, but useful.

But looking at the uber-aterisk pattern, it reminded me of a comic book I read long, long ago that starts with Superman flying through outer space and a star goes nova behind him. Doesn't really bother him that much, but it was a cool visual. I wanted to reproduce that, so I draw a horrible sketch, then decided to find a reference image. Couldn't find many comic book ones of him flying head-on. There were tons of hits from the Christopher Reeve movie, but it was essentially all the same image where one arm is out, the other is by his chest. That's not what I wanted—I wanted him, arms in front of his head, hands in fists, heading right towards the viewer. Eventually I found one.

I used that as a reference image and did a sketch of it. Then I learned that Krita supports both raster and vector graphics, which is quite cool. So I could ink it in the same program. Coloring was a little more clunky as it doesn't have the "live paint" capability of Illustrator. Shading was even worse. First, there are very few online tutorials or discussions on it (compared to Illustrator or Photoshop) and it does not provide an easy way to make slices and do fill shading, again lsomething that Live Paint provides. Painting with a brush means that it's hard to blend things, as different strokes will make secutions have variations in shading. Using a blur filter on a filter layer helps smooth things out, but it seems like it's not as easy and still looks blotchy. Of course my skills are limited, as is my knowlege of tall of the capabilities of the program. So the jury is still out. I'm not sure if I'd swtich over to it. But for some things it is appealing. And for travel, taking the new pen/stylus is easier than taking my Wacom tablet, plus the pen (and the holder for good measure). So we'll see if I use it more or not