How to use this Page

Heh, that’s funny. I’m not a big Warhol fan, but this is history.

That is pretty awesome. I remember using amiga’s in high school video production class.

the odds were stacked in Andy’s favor. How can you lose with Debbie Harry as your muse?

Yeah, my Bonnie Prince Billy album has remained one of my favorites for what, 5 or 6 years now?

I took part in a FLYP conference a couple of weeks ago and was amazed at how state funds had paid for artwork for the Florida Youth Program, but there were all sorts of limitations on what Florida libraries could do with that artwork even in promoting those programs.

This was commissioned artwork and would probably be considered akin to contractor or subcontractor reports, which can (unfortunately) be paid for by public money but maintain copyright.

Still: after about 45 minutes of talking about dos and don’ts in regard to this artwork I found myself wishing that all work done by or for the government, at all levels (including state, county, and city), were automatically in the public domain.

I had the great privilege to see Dale do the rudimentary talk at Access 2008 that led to this article. Very smart man.

[...] librarian.net » Blog Archive » why don’t librarians like to give their code away? "Dale Askey has written a great column on how libraries “share and fail to share open source software” and looks into some of the reasons that might be the case." (tags: libraries opensource code) [...]

That’s incredible. Thanks for posting that.

Wow.
I wish I had that kind of energy sometimes.
Makes me feel better knowing that they were commissioned to do it. : )

That would be great but I’m not holding my breath. Now that they own the competition they really don’t have any incentive.

I also dislike the Adobe Illustrator interface although I’ve not used Freehand.

What I can’t stand about Illustrator is how heavily dialog and panel-based it is. Everytime you want to do something, you have to open a dialog or floating palette. I’m sick of their floating-panel-for-everything approach to interface design.

I’m on a PC and personally think Xara (a PC-only vector illustration program) beats Illustrator hands-down in the usability stakes. Watching how Freehand creates stars/polygons in the video above, I think Xara still beats it.

There are some demo movies of the Xara interface here
http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/demos/

It could have been great, but the guy seems to be a beginner with AI, a lot of his complains are just because he’s used to the FH way and doesn’t know the AI way to do the same thing. He’s got some valid points, but they tend to be buried under his inexperience…

It’s interesting to see how FH works(ed), for an AI user like me though… The polygon tool in FH seems indeed much better.

Another thing is the idea that because Adobe bought Macromedia, they can just put whatever FH feature they want in AI… As a developer, I can tell you that it would be GREAT if it was that easy… ;)

thanx garth for charging adobe’s citidel!
Freehand rocks illustrator off the merry-go-round! It was sooo much easier to use, and at our agency we had the ‘illys’ and the ‘handers’, we were always taunting each other
when we found something under the hood that was better!
to me ‘ai’ is like the ‘pc’ of programs when ‘fh’ was the ‘mac’.
IT WOULD BE GREAT if the proGRAMMAS would modify Ai with the better
features of FH, like you demonstrated in the vid, but corpoRATIONS
that were ’stuck with to draw with’ can’t figure what the fuss’s about…
or what these little complaining squeeks are!

mark @
ISM &
BAMm

thanx garth for charging adobe’s citidel!
Freehand rocks illustrator off the merry-go-round! It was sooo much easier to use, and at our agency we had the ‘illys’ and the ‘handers’, we were always taunting each other
when we found something under the hood that was better!
to me ‘ai’ is like the ‘pc’ of programs when ‘fh’ was the ‘mac’.
IT WOULD BE GREAT if the proGRAMMAS would modify Ai with the better
features of FH, like you demonstrated in the vid, but corpoRATIONS
that we’re ’stuck with to draw with’ can’t figure what the fuss’s about…
or what these little complaining squeeks are!

mark @
ISM &
BAMm

Oh man oh man oh man. When is this coming to the Wii? I don’t have a Wii but I can dream can’t I?

Perfect thanks!

I tried to use this prog and couldn’t really understand the controls. Moving the canvas around was really hard. Such a disappointment because it would be so cool to draw without anyone knowing what I was up to!

As for Wii, I don’t know anything about people creating homebrew apps. What I do know is that the Wii can run certain webapps through the browser, so you just find a web-based drawing tool and use that.

Pretty cool. This turns the DS into a digital sketch pad. I have a Wii and I would imagine that it would be pretty cool so long as the ability to edit control preferences was included.

I will have to try and find a drawing app on line to use. Problem is most of these are made in Flash and the Wii only supports up to Flash 7.

Adobe has Flash Player version 9 for download now which means most newer Flash files are going to be 8 and up. :(

Pretty cool. This turns the DS into a digital sketch pad. I have a Wii and I would imagine that it would be pretty cool so long as the ability to edit control preferences was included.

I will have to try and find a drawing app online to use. Problem is most of these are made in Flash and the Wii only supports up to Flash 7.

Adobe has Flash Player version 9 for download now which means most newer Flash files are going to be 8 and up. :(

I use this program and love it! It’s awesome for someone like myself who travels alot. Very easy to use if you know Painter(or painting). Best of all it’s free.

Keep an eye for another program for the DS called Inchworm. http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Inchworm.html

That’s it. I’ll have to hijack the DS of my poor son and enhance it to run Colors!.

Tried this last night. Works very well. I didn’t find the controls as problematic as others did. I actually thought it was very easy to pick-up.

Colors is in my honest opinion very easy to use. You don’t need to wait to make your own animations. Check out for Animanatee 1.3 http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14116 Awesome and as easy use as Colors. Keep on creating :D

Hm…looks promising. On Word it just looks waaay too scary. Daunting.

Oh wow, that makes a big differance! I want one now!! Too bad I don’t have a mac. They orginize so well. *puffs with jealousy*

Looks very cool. As a PC person, may I recommend http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html Page Four? It doesn’t have all the functionality that Scrivener seems to, but it’s a nice, light, many documents visible/workable at once alternative to Word.

I love Scrivener. I’ve been using it for about a year. I use the bits on the right (the inspector?) too. I keep notes there, even pictures, and I use the synopsis cards for keeping track things like what day it is, subplots, and things I need to keep track of for continuity.

Using scrivener makes it so much easier to bounce around inside my story without losing my place. It’s a totally groovy program.

i have never ever ever had good luck with a mac. one time one literally ate my disc. it went in like a normal disc and came out with scratches and gouges in it, plus no information on it. bye bye chemistry lab…….but i’m not bitter. *sigh*

it looks like a cool program, though. less stress is good.

raisin? raisin?  hee! :D

i’ze not fond of word. but it is all i can haz. when i gradjooate colleje, i’ze getting a mac. thenz i get scrivener and then i happydance. yayz!

I am so bitter it is only available for the mac. :’(

That actually looks like it would be really useful for my next term paper.

I’ve been using Scrivener for a little more than a year now, and I really love it. I’m glad to see so many people who love it, too. The fellow who wrote the program is a nice guy as well, and has always provided fast, personal, accurate support whenever I’ve needed it.

i wish i’d had this for my thesis, it looks very cool indeed. probably not worth doing another long document for, though!

i don’t really want scrivener, because i generallly don’t write long documents. what works really well if you are trying to make something pretty (like a brochure, a fancy report, or a flyer) is pages, the mac version of word (yes, another mac-only thing. sorry!) it has a lot of templates, much more than word. it has ones for 3 different types of posters, travel journals, photo journals, several fliers, invitations, 2 postcards, school reports, and a template for quizzes. pages is really bad for a lot of writing, if your not concerned how it looks like. so you wouldn’t want to use it for a rough draft. but if your making something that needs to look well laid out, it’s amazing.

Gina Black: I use the bits on the right (the inspector?) too.

Yup, that’s great too. And if you’re writing a multiple pov novel it’s wonderful being able to label each chapter (or scene) with the correct pov.

If I’d talked about all my fave things the post woulda been ten times as long.

Cat Sparks: I love it so much I sent a gushing fan letter to the dude who invented it. How embarassing.

That’s nothing! I posted my gushing fan letter publicly on the Scrivener forum.

Gwen: the fellow who wrote the program is a nice guy as well, and has always provided fast, personal, accurate support whenever I’ve needed it.

Yup, he’s amazing. I had a prob and he got back to me about it in half an hour.

I’m another huge fan of scrivener. I evangelize it to all of my writer friends. It works well for writing short stories, too. I love being able to track character bios, research notes, outlines and feedback all in one place.

That looks more like a basic text editor as opposed to a word processor. I’ve never had problems with word, though I haven’t tried to combine all the chapters of my WIP either.

As a computer geek, I am often working with GB sized log files and I use TextPad.exe. It can pretty much handle anything.

BTW - is that just Word for mac that is being complained about or is it PC word too? I’m still learning to be more mac savvy these days and haven’t used word on mac to see if/how different it is from the pc version.

Yummy, I’m glad I have a mac.

I like Scrivener, tho I have yet to use it to its full potential.

My favorite feature so far is the index card board, where I can write quick character sketches.

An update. I hadn’t used Scrivener for some time–when I opened it this morning, it asked me if I wanted to update to version 1.11 (I had version 1.03). I updated, at which point Scrivener asked me if I wanted to open the Tutorial because I apparently had never used Scrivener before. Except I had–the files were just made using the old version.

I went roundabout and opened the .scriv files via Document. Scrivener asked me if I wanted to update the files to the new version. I was then warned that I could not try to reopen the updated files with an older version in the future. If I did, Scrivener would update the files again, and likely corrupt them.

Anyway, I updated the files. So far, I can’t get my character sketches to display on Corkboard. The text is still saved, because it shows up when I mouse over the character names on the sidebar. But I can’t open the corkboard itself.

still working through it.

Patrick– The scrivener documentation actually says, i think, that it’s a text editor, not a word processor. But a text editor with special features designed to help out the authors of book-length works.

I have yet to find anything better than loose leaf. I write all my first drafts in pen, then grudgingly type them out.

I can see that might not work so well for novels though….

You said in part “For the Fairy novel I had notes from my editor and others, a list of kinds of fairies”. At first glance I thought you said “my editor and mother” and thought “WOW! Your mum helps you write!” I am not sure that I could let my mum do that, were she still around because of all the gratuitous sex and violence in my NaNo. I realized it was “others” instead and now I am speculating on who these “others” may be. Aliens? The Quokka Liberation Front? Werewolves? Inquiring minds want to know!

PS: I hate Word with the heat of a thousand burning suns, too, but I am not able to upgrade to happy Macland right now. Boo hisss!

this made my day. i downloaded a free trial of scrivener, and it is all things beautiful and wonderful. i can use it for drafting novels (joy) and for writing fancy term papers.

scrivener rocks. i have writ a novel and a half on it, and it makes the whole process so easy i feel like i’m cheating.

i use the inspector when i’m editing too, to put reminders about all the stuff that needs to be added/changed for that chapter, and then delete them as i go.

also, i have a scrivener file to store all my short stories (all=2.5), so when someone says ‘do you have a short story’ i know where to find them all.

AND finally, i love the ‘targets’ function, so I can say i am writing 2000 words today, and i’m not allowed to watch 30 rock until i do.

I use Open Office on my laptop cuz Word 2007 is currently out of my budget and i can’t find the word 2003 cd.

Open Office isn’t as pretty (or as advanced) as word 2007 but it does what i need it to do so i’m not complaining.

Scrivener sounds fantastic though.

Ooooh, it’s so streamlined. And pretty! And if it’s working for you, I just might try it. But how do you send it in to your editor? Does it convert to a word file? And, for those of us whose novels lean dangerously close to the novella, is there a way to see how many pages the document is?

Why is it available for macs only? *is very unhappy* WHY???

I use word, which works well enough. (especially after having written by hand for a couple of months - definitely enough to make one appreciate it). However, I do find it frustrating having to open several (some of them rather lengthy) documents and then constantly flip between them. I’ve often thought there must be a better way! And I only use page breaks to divide up my documents so I can find things (like particular chapters) in them; the rest of the time I use views where they are basically irrelevant.
Scrivener sounds fantastic. I’m terribly annoyed.

I use Word for Mac and I don’t have all those templates that Emily is talking about. Also, I’m in the midst of trying out Scrivener (for the second time — Gina tried to hook me on it a year ago and it didn’t stick) but so far, it’s not sticking for me this time either. I don’t usually keep a lot of files open as I write, but I LOVE having pages, and I don’t have pages here. I have no idea whether I’m looking at the beginning of a chapter or the end. It makes it very hard for me to “see” the pacing, if that makes sense.

My trial goes on for a few weeks more, but I’ll be out of town for most of them.

In all my years using Word for Mac, all my manuscripts, I’ve never had a problem keeping my entire manuscript in one file (knock wood). Splitting them up into chapter files also wouldn’t work for me.

Drat, and just when I thought I could live without a mac.

I found out about this program about a year ago when I first learned Holly liked it. I haven’t found a mac yet, and with such an in depth look at the program, you’re making me crave a mac again!

I dabbled with q10 during nano, and liked the mandatory full screen mode. It also made typewriter noises as you typed. I had two problems with it, I use italics for character thoughts, so when I switched over to word, I had to comb through the document to find all the ‘thought quotes.’ search didn’t help, because I found all of the normal apostrophes.

I used open office’s writer after that, because I couldn’t find a copy of word that would transfer to my archaic laptop. Off nano’s forums, I found out word has an outline feature, which makes it really convenient to separate chapters and scenes.

i tried ywriter too, but wasn’t impressed.

Lucky you with Scrivener! Oh well.

I’ll have to go pick up prom nights from hell. I got 21 proms, and didn’t realize there was a similar compilation out by the other half of my favorite authors.

The WordToolOfSatan sounds like an old time gospel or choir song with lots of handclapping and stomping.

Oh, the word tool of Satan, it’s a-
Comin’ for you, brother! It’s a-
Comin’ for you, sister!
Just! Say! No!

Word will actually do most of what you’re talking about here if you take the time to learn how to do it. Master document function will break a ms up into chapters for you and you can work on individual chapters or on the whole document at once. On the drop down menu under “View,” you’ll find a number of fun tools, like a Document Map that allows you to hop around in your document easily and a Full Screen function that does the same as the Scrivener full screen function. Not trying to convert you back to Word but offering for those who are coveting but can’t have Scrivener. If you are stuck with Word, it’s really worthwhile taking the time to play around with it and learn its many functions. You can do a lot with Reference, Frames and Track Changes tools to keep a project organized.

Effie: I have been using Word for close to twenty years. I have tried all the things you have suggested and they are all kind of broken. Word was never designed for Macs and have never worked for me on them. Well, not since Word 4 when it was simpler and leaner. I’m thrilled it works for you, but way more thrilled that I’ve found scrivener.

I am jealous. I hate microsoft.

I love Scrivener, but I must warn you. If you do not read the instructions, this author’s nightmare could happen to you . . .

http://lisayee.livejournal.com/60457.html

Sigh.

Lisa Yee: I does not wish to be unkind, but, um that kind of looks like a user error . . .

Well, I suppose it could be considered a user error. However, i think that scrivener should come with a pool boy who could prevent that sort of thing from happening.

I owe my novel draft to two things: Novel in 90 and Scrivener.

I just discovered this blog due to a link from Scalzi’s Whatever — great blog you have here.

And I cast another vote for Scrivener — I’ve been using it for several months and written about 25,000 words of a novel in it.

I have only one concern with it — I’m a little bit fanatical about standardizing formats for word-processing files. Some science-fiction writers will occasionally try to access a story they wrote twenty years ago in a word-processor that doesn’t exist anymore, and they find they can’t open the file. I’m worried about that happening with Scrivener. For that reason, I’m thinking of switching at some point to plain text files for drafts, then importing to Word for the final draft.

OTOH, Scrivener is just so damn good, I’m in no rush to make the change.

The New York Times reviewed Scrivener a day or two ago. Your review is better.

@Mitch Wagner: Scrivener doesn’t use a proprietary file format; the .scriv file is essentially just a folder containing all the project files, so even if the program is no longer installed, all the content is still accessible as text files. Admittedly, text files with fairly unhelpful file names.

Facebook is going downhill fast …
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/140225

Wow, good to know… I’ve been thinking about posting some of my work on facebook, just to show friends or whatever. Guess I won’t be doing that now. Thanks for posting.

Which is why you have to upload photos you ABSOLUTELY DON’T OWN ANY RIGHT TO. Make sure you upload a LOT of them, too. And make sure you tick the box that says “Yes, master, I own the rights to this photo I just fished on google”. Come on, pass the word around.
I’ll be waiting for the cops to take me to jail for just a photo of Johnny Depp passed as my profile picture.

WOW! Thanx for the heads up Anna! Sorry you got burned by ‘bacefook’ - “What you aren’t killed from - you’re stronger from.”

Mark Jaquette
BAMm GRAPHICS
illustrationISM

I had heard the same thing about Blogger, but a closer inspection reveals the following:

Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

I’m not a lawyer but Blogger looks a little more secure. Still, it seems that getting your own website offers a little more protection than publishing on public ones.

Is the same TOS with Spaces (from Live.com) and very equal to MySpace… please avoid those!!!

I cancelled my Facebook pace, because Facebook as a company is really corrupt. The whole thing exists solely to track your purchases and online activity and then spit ads back at you. The networking thing is just a facade to get you to give up your consumer information. Even after you cancel your account, they keep you in the system. At least myspace was STARTED with good intentions.

Myspace went through all of this nonsense a while back, but eventually changed their liscensing agreement to be slightly less fascist.

Here’s what artists should do: don’t put any useful personal info on your networking pages, just put image links (with your copyright notice on it) to pages you have control over, like your website/blog! That’s what i do with my myspace.

America’s copyright laws were never made for the internet, and they just don’t make coherent sense anymore! they’re about 3 decades past due for a total overhaul!

I read an article in the paper quite a few months ago warning would be facebookers of their copyright terms. I then proceeded to write a post on Facebook warning my fellow artist friends of what I had read. Some of my friends replies informed me that Facebook actually needs those rights to protect themselves from would be lawsuits since they are trafficking alot of intellectual property. I’m not trying to say people shouldn’t be careful, but I think it might be a little overblown. At the end of the day you still own the rights to your work and haven’t paid a dime. To me the site is kind of an amalgam of msn messenger and craigslist and should be used as such. Artists trying to market themselves should get a website. blah blah blah…I’m done.

i see your point, but i’m pretty sure the only warning they need is “do not post copyrighted material that you do not own to facebook, any such material will be removed.” And then they should enforce that rule as best they can. Facebook has no legitimate reason to use material from any specific profile in whole or in part - they just want to save their own butts from a lawsuit when they upload everything on your profile to some permanant archive and pawn off the information to advertisement engines. I understand that this is how they make their money, but its not good business. I don’t mind seeing ads, but i do mind seeing ads that are sent to me only because i visited X, Y, and Z websites over the last few months.

Craigslist, by the way, is a perfect example of the ethically responsible way to run such a website. Behance also has a pretty good business model, even if it is invite-only.

A quick check of Flickr and Photobucket Terms of Service show that they too have very similarly worded license agreements. However, neither of them list the right to “sell.”

It appears that by uploading to just about any free image-hosting service, you are granting them the right to use your images for any purpose they choose. As long as they’re not selling your images to third parties, the right to display your work may just be the cost of doing business with free image hosting services.

But you still retain ownership; if your posted work ends up in some book, magazine, or website not owned by the image-hosting company, you’ve got a copyright infringement on your hands.

i cried a little…

Christmas (and wishful thinking) is just around the corner…

I got to get me one

What gets me is when it turns into a normal tablet when accessing a secondary display… genius.

Ok… we just had a Wacom sales rep come by our studio and demo the new Cintiq12WX so I wrote up a some thoughts on it …simply put, it’s amazing. All of us were drooling over it within seconds of seeing it. It’s about the size of a 9×12 wacom tablet in width and thickness and is extremely light and seemed to stay cool. The screen is bright and crisp. That said, the screen itself is a bit small, which is also part of it’s appeal in some ways. The rep had it running on a Mac with all of his fonts cranked down to like 6pt to make more real estate on the screen which was fine and readable. The side buttons are something I rarely use but will likey use now. The sliders are now pen stylus sensitive and can be tapped like a button to increase/decrease or scroll up/down or whatever buttons you want to program into them. Also you’ll notice the edges of the Cintiq are sloped downwards with the sliders on the outer edge to prevent accidental zooming/scrolling etc with your arms.

In size, it’s basically like working inside of a margined 8.5×11 surface. Some of the cool stuff about it is that it finally is practical to spin it around to draw tough angles thanks to its size and weight plus the little perfectly centered low profile nylon nub on the back that allow one to spin it on an axis. The stand on the back only has 2 positions standing or folded, but the standing position seemed fine if you need that. One could get a little creative and figure out how to angle it to diff positions if need be. The really cool thing is that it’s now practical to put the thing in your lap and work with it.

The ugly part of this is all the cabling. There’s a 4×4x1inch box that all your cables, including a monitor cable, have to be routed through. I guess there’s really no other solution to this unless they adopt the HDMI standard somewhere down the road. (not likely)

But the news that caught me by surprise was the price: According to tour rep here in the PNW, it’s going to be available mid December in the US for $995.00! We had all calculated $1700+ based on the Euro conversion rate but I guess they’re getting aggressive with it’s pricing in the US to get it out to as many students and professionals with portable studios as possible. I have a feeling you’re going to see a lot of these in cafe’s soon, I may be one of them:)

…ok after watching their little ad it looks like they’ll have multiple positions for the stand. We must have had an early version with only up or down position. Anyway I think you’re going to love it.

$995.00 US?!

# vincent giard says:
November 29th, 2007 at 1:51 pm

$995.00 US?!

That’s what the rep said…

The whole thing isn’t 26cm x 16cm, that’s just the size of the screen. Wacom’s site says the real dimensions are 405mm x 270mm and 17mm thick, or for US losers like myself, about 16″ x 10.6″ and two thirds of an inch thick.

That price is about what I thought it would be when I first saw this. A lot of things are more expensive in the UK so you can’t just estimate the US price by converting the price to dollars (which would come out to ~$1700). I mean, the regular Cintiq 21UX is selling for £2190 which is ~$4500, waaaay more than the $2500 it actually sells for here.

I estimated what it would cost by using percentages though. This new Cintiq 12WX is £830 which is about 38% of the cost of a Cintiq 21UX is ~£2200 in the UK. In the US, the Cintiq 21UX sells for $2500, but the price of the 12WX will still be about 38% of that which comes out to $950 — pretty close to the $995 that Rayl was quoted.

This is great news. I was just about to pull the trigger on the 21UX. I’ll be checking out Wacom’s site every day.

I’ve used this for drawing backgrounds. I found it frustrating to use… but I see now that I wasn’t using the tools to their potentials. These tutorials will help a lot.

SketchUp used to offer similar tutorials for free, back when they were owned by @Last. I guess those disappeared when the company was bought by Google; it’s nice to see they are back in some capacity (I taught myself to use the program four or five years ago mainly using these online tutorials). I find that this is the easiest and most intuitive modeling/rendering program out there; it particularly shines when I have to make fast, last-minute changes to a design. It might not be the best in its field in terms of image quality, but it certainly is better than its analogue equivalent: the cardboard sketch model.

OMG! Does this work on Tom Cruise movies?!!

Is that real?

You may be amazed that it does exist, and is available as a gimp plugin, or an online thingumy

http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/
http://rsizr.com/

wow.

I saw this a while back and then the site you can play with. It really changes the way you think of photo-reality.

wow: http://sketchcast.com/channel/Kreed/

hi! I still hand draw my blog, but scanning all my drawings.. yes, it could be a little boring but I like the result!
Maybe this website will help me!

(good post, as always!)

Very cool. I tried it and it’s really great.

http://bestcartoonblog.blogspot.com/

Thanks Johnny! Everyone’s sharing a lot of information on how they keep track of their business expenses, plus I’ve found a few other applications which I’ll add in an addendum, so there’s lots to take in. (Great pick for a visual! I didn’t even think of that one!)

Yes, it’s a great list. I found that having someone setup my quickbooks for me based on my needs really helped me keep organized. There’s a bunch of companies on line that do it.

-Chris

The brushes look great, Gerard has chops, but his wacky commentary on the videos soon got a little trying. I wanted him to say something, ANYTHING informative about the brushes, or about anything at all. There’s nothing wrong with a little humor, but this was relentless. I would’ve preferred that he teach me something, rather than try to lamely entertain me.

It’s not that he doesn’t have a good sense of humor—-that’s not it at all—-and I don’t mean to criticize him personally. I just think the video would be more effective if he had something to say.

I have a relative who does this kind of thing, but he doesn’t confine it to video. Every time you try to talk to him hoping for something that resembles conversation, he comes out with gag after wacky gag, and polite laughter only encourages him. All I ask is that he offer me the bone of an actual concrete subject to nibble on, but he can’t seem to manage this.

So I’m sure that Gerard isn’t like this ALL THE TIME, but what he may not realize is that he has something to offer here besides Photoshop brushes, and he’s not sharing.

well- i guess the video is to sell brushes, not to “tutorial” us to do our own. i liked his humor too, but what ticked me off to almost smashing the screen were the one million “ah”s in the sentences.
i really like their work, especially gerards, but a lot of chris koelle´s work looks soooo ashley wood ripped off…argh!

I don’t need a tutorial, but I think it would help to sell brushes if he said something other than nonsense.

“chris koelle´s work looks soooo ashley wood ripped off”

I actually think Chris’s work is more rounded then Ashley’s. similarities are there but Chris relies less on the accidents of his art.

I’m not a huge Ashley Wood fan, but your criticism doesn’t make sense to me. I think it’s very difficult to make accidents WORK in your art. To know when to leave well enough alone, and to know when to not to fix something that doesn’t need fixing, or that’s there to reveal something else you didn’t notice.

However, I have noticed that Wood at his worst fudges in his draftsmanship. Not in a Bill Sienkewitz (sp?) expressionistic sort of way, but in a I can’t be bothered sort of way. If that’s what you mean by relying on accidents. There’s a lot of painterly mess sometimes that doesn’t describe stuff, and isn’t interesting in itself for its own sake.

Really, what more could he say about texture brushes, you know? You choose a brush, tweak the size, the tolerance, color, etc. and just work with it. Nothing else really needs to be said about these brushes, if you ask me. It’s just an opportunity to check out what these brushes can offer. And I didn’t mind the humor.

Hey guys, this is Chris. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I openly admire Ash’s work–his sense of design, shape, angles, line, etc. and I have obviously tried to emulate his work in some of my art.

At the same time, there are countless other artists whose sense of design and style have inspired my work and even the work of Ash Wood himself. Masters like Klimt, Egon Schiele, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bob Peak, Dave McKean, Phil Hale, George Pratt, Kent Williams, the list goes on. Anyone who’s a fan of one of these guys is a fan of the others.

And there are a thousand other artists whose work has affected the kind of stuff I do. I actually consider myself kind of bipolar when it comes to my art–different ways of working and different styles come from different moods (obsessive compulsive, painstakingly detailed etchings, carefree loose sketches, and so on). In other words, I’ve done plenty of stuff that looks nothing like Ash Wood’s work (or any of the artists mentioned above).

All that to say, great artists (living or dead) inevitably inspire and inform other artists’ work.

Peace,
Chris

Thanks for posting Chris! Everything you said is pretty much what I thought about your stuff.

You guys should check out Chris’s digital/drawn/animated short done for PBS about a battle in iraq from the perspective of a soldier’s blog called ‘Men in Black’.