Laura's Art Dump!

[Aquamentis12]

Haha it's not a problem; ask away! :P

Yeah, Photoshop is in the hundreds; over a grand for the latest version straight from Adobe too, I believe. I was very lucky that a friend of mine already had CS5 for Mac, so it didn't cost me much. I won't be upgrading that anytime soon though. .___. Gosh golly.

I've not actually tried GIMP; Photoshop has animation capabilities on it, although I've rarely ever used them. Maybe that's something I should set a project for in the future! There are a couple of other programs I want to try like Illustrator and ArtRage; I think I have demos of them from a digital art magazine I had subscribed to kicking about so I'll really need to dig those out. Who knows; there might be a copy of GIMP hidden away in one of them too.

 

I don't believe you can really get anything smaller than A5; if you could I wouldn't though. I've never tried a larger tablet so I can't compare, but I've never had any problems with a small tablet and all the digital art I've ever shown has been made using my little one. I do hear from other artists that a larger tablet means you can draw a lot more freely, without having to zoom in and out and whatnot, but again, it's never bothered me because I've never known any different.

 

I think it very much depends on the type of tablet, but I know that mine doesn't work through paper. What you CAN do though, is if you have a scanner, just scan your sketch in, open it up in your art program, throw a new layer over the top and trace it that way. :)

You can get a couple of really quirky products that enable you to transfer sketches into digital format, for instance the Wakom Inkling (£60+) allows you to simultaneously create a digital vector of sketches as you draw them (I have one but I've not fully explored it's capabilities yet).

 

It's almost insane, imo, for a single art program like photoshop to be so expensive. I suppose though, maybe it's to limit the amount of crazy awesome artists out there that are already clamoring to get into what's probably a very hard field to get into anyway. Like, cost control of the population or something? LOL Don't mind me, just a quick conspiracy-type theory that just struck me. lol Either that or the company just wants to get a BIG profit for developing something with so many bells and whistles. lol Those are the only reasons, for right now, that I've come up with for why some things like that are so expensive that pretty much you'd have to be in a company to be able to afford such programs.

 

Anyway, What are the dimensions of an A5 sheet? LOL They never taught us about different paper sizes in high school. ;) I'd probably get a cheaper wacom tablet, preferrably when there's a sale of some sort at a store like Best Buy or something. XD I'm not in a major hurry. XD If I can get used to a smaller/cheaper tablet, then I can decide if I'd like to save up for a bigger one, or if the smaller one is good enough for me.

 

Ah, I see. I suppose the stylus and the tablet have to have close contact to register with each other... My sketch pages are probably a bit too thick, they feel heavier than a page of Printer paper, for example. LOL What a coincidence, that's EXACTLY how I work on my scans. I scan them, use my select tool and it's options to select the lines start a new layer and then fill in the selection in that new layer. You can see some of the results in my thread in this forum.

 

Animation is fun! Though frustrating (at times) for an uneducated hobbyist like myself. ;) But you should definitely give it a shot if you've got the the program functions for it! :D I'm sure your program has a LOT more bells and whistles than my antiquated Animation Shop 3. ;) It's almost as old as Paint Shop Pro 6! LOL (It came with paint shop pro 7, which I almost never use due to the interface)

 

Thanks for the neat info! :D

[thatlauralass]

I guess it's so expensive because Adobe have invested so much marketing and research into it. I suppose if you look at most sports and fields of expertise, the leading technologies and equipment are always crazy expensive.

 

Well, A4 is your typical sheet of white printer paper; if you fold it in half, that's A5.
If you fold a sheet of A5 in half, that's A6, and in the same instance, if you sit two sheets of A4 together, you get A3, and so on.
Here's a quick snap for a visual; A4 printer paper next to my A5 tablet. You can see the tablet's just slightly off of A5 actually, but it's pretty much there.

 

 

 

Haha yeah, I can imagine an animation is a huge accomplishment to finish, but the amount of effort it would take (drawing each individual frame) makes me constantly put it off. x_x'

[Aquamentis12]

Yeah, I suppose all that R&D stuff has to be paid for. lol

 

Ah, I see. Thanks for illustrating the difference for me. :)

 

Well, while animation can be frustrating at times, animation certainly CAN be fun. ;) I've had to rely on experiments to try to figure out HOW to animate. I think for not having any lessons, I do pretty okish at some of it. But it'd be nice to not have to experiment, at least not as much as I presently have to. ;) lol Although, as in my thread on this forum, not having a "set" style does give me a bit of creative freedom in trying out different things. I THINK it helps my experiments, but I could be ignorantly wrong about that and would only know that if/whenever I can find some decent lessons. My first MAJOR graphics heavy animation, was a project where the first sequence in the project ended up being around 290 frames and nearly 1 minute in length. I started it just having ideas in my head from a certain song. And I just HAD to get them out on paper, and see if I could color and animate them. XD My point is, you never know until you try. ;) Who knows, you might just enjoy it! XD (Or like a friend of mine, you might loathe it. lol)

 

Thanks again for the advice! :)

[thatlauralass]

You're welcome! n_n

 

Also not exactly any new work, but I've made a tumblr for all my digital artwork (at the moment it's all neo related), so feel free to check it out! http://shenkuucrayon.tumblr.com/

[Aquamentis12]

Wow! Very neat artwork and nice layout for the tumblr! :D

[thatlauralass]

 

Finally coloured this lineart I've had sitting around forever. .__.

This is the new design for my kougra, Luanolu. She's slowly evolved from a generic tiger into a gracefull shenkuu beauty. #noregrets

I'm not sure whether to submit this new piece into the stressful BC or try for the pet spotlight.

 

This is my old artwork of her from a good couple of years ago, where she won gold in the BC:

 

It's kinda weird to see how much my style has changed.