Another Friday, another blog!

I reset my alert so that I remember to post each Friday. Week has been eventful, we have friend’s in town from LA, Ify and his fiancée Emily. I illustrated Ify’s character from his Push the Roll episode a few months ago.

I’ve been using Clip Studio a lot more professionally, the image above was one of the first images I made in it. I had heard a lot about Clip from artists over the years, I knew that lots of people that do manga/anime style art loved it, and a lot of people that do comics work use it. I started considering using it last summer after hearing the rave reviews for the last few years from Dave Rapoza’s art streams. He integrated it into his pipeline a few years ago and I was curious to try it. Ultimately I delayed really giving it a go because I don’t like following the art trends in the industry. Often times artist begin mimicking other artist’s techniques and their work turns into crappier versions of the artists that they copy. After all the wait I began to get sick of Adobe’s expense and AI garbage so I wanted to give Clip a chance and man was I dumb for not trying it sooner. It’s just as they say, it feels better drawing in Clip. Most of the best brushes and textures are all free in their asset library and the way the inking and pencil brushes behave is just different, they are more robust and the pressure curve is better in the way the brush size dynamically changes as you make lines. I still need to practice painting in the program, but for drawing I now prefer it over Procreate and Photoshop. I highly recommend trying it out.

Okay in other news, I’m planning to start a podcast. I know it’s all the rage with men of a certain age, but most of my favourite artist interview podcasts stopped and I’m seeing a gap in the industry now, and I think I’d like to try and fill it. I’ve reached out to 4 artists, 3 have gotten back to me and I plan to reach out to more. I need to begin scheduling the calls and get my recording setup figured out. Today one of my scheduled tasks is to begin scheduling all the different artists. I plan to record all three of the people I know I have first, and then begin releasing on a semi-weekly basis. I won’t post who the artists are yet, not until I lock down the interviews.

I forgot to post some images I made for Near Dark Studios last week. I made these illustrations months ago, ultimately they will be used for an actual play show, but the final style of the characters won’t reflect the look of the game they are from, which I’m art directing currently.

Note how the barbarian guy was redone in a slightly different style. This style reflects the look of the game we are designing currently.

Anyway, I’ll have more to post next week, ideally I’ll have a couple interviews done by then and I’ll have figured out how to post them up. Have a great weekend!