Paper

53's app, called "Paper", is a stack of Moleskins, a handful of drawing tools and a small array of colors. It isn't for creating finished work or storing a gallery's worth of masterpieces locally on your iPad. The app is for a different kind of work, the sort one does before they really get to work.

If you've ever used a pen you lifted from the hotel you're staying at to jot down an idea on a napkin, this is app is for you. If you've ever grabbed the crayons from the table at the pizza place to entertain yourself by drawing on the back of a kid's menu, this app is right up your alley. The promotional video shows someone using their iPad to jot down items while wandering the city.

If you're the sort of creative person who has their best ideas no matter where they happen to be, check this app out. It's free, and you can try out the features before you buy any of them.

It's Good To Have Friends

Thank You Steve Jobs

I spent yesterday morning in my bed using my iPad to generate text using the WriteRoom App. I didn't know yet that Steve Jobs had passed away. It wouldn't be until later when I'd pop open Safari and see Apple's site that I'd receive the news, and again when a friend called and left a message on my phone.

My good friend Dan suggested that we have some sort of gathering of our friends, with our Macs and iPads to reminisce about the fruits of Steve Jobs' labor. It felt silly for a moment, I mean it's not like I actually knew Steve Jobs. Then I thought about how much Apple's products had really changed my life.

I got my first Mac in 2009, at Elle Phillip's recommendation, a tool that would be integral to my personal metamorphosis. What a difference it is to have devices that will work as hard as you do. Tools that were crafted with the same care as you would craft things. My work in the last two years is a testament to that synergy.

In the last two years I've written close to a million words (I'm almost there) toward my books, rendered hundreds of hand drawn images, communicated with dozens of colleagues and peers, and done hours and hours of tireless research. My iPad and my Macs helped make those things possible by being incredible tools that redefined my workspace and my workflow.

Steve Jobs is responsible for the company that provided me those tools.

I remember vividly the day my iPad arrived at my home. I'd wanted such a device since there'd been even a hint of them, outside the boundaries of science fiction, back around the turn of the century. Steve and Apple understood what it would take to make such a device "Magical" for me. It wasn't the screen or the user experience delivered by iOS on a tablet, it was the 10 hours of battery life that would allow me to go anywhere I wanted and generate text and images without worrying about finding a outlet.

There are a great many people who do not understand Apple as a company or the type of person Steve Jobs was. The more callous of those folks make jokes about cult-like behavior on the part of their customers and Steve's own ability to warp reality. I think that if all you do is surf the Net, check email and play games, one can appreciate a Mac.

If your work ethic is such that you generate thousands of words of text and/or hundreds of thousands of pixels worth of visual content in a year, you'll come to more than appreciate a Mac. You'll depend on it. When you push your own limits as a creative person, you need tools that have no limits.

For me, Steve Jobs and company provided. I am hopeful that he's planted a seed at Apple that will allow them to continue to provide folks like me with the tools we need. I think for the foreseeable future, his legacy is secure.

-- Sent from my Tech Envy Generator, using the BlogPress App, edited on my MacBook Pro

Old Staff Fighter verses New

Clickorz to emgiggen

Sadly, the older pic looks better when cut and diminished to 200 x 240 pixels for the fly-in graphic during combat. Dave and I have been talking about developing for a different platform that would give me more screen landscape to play with. Might not be a bad idea as my artwork outgrows our current 800 x 480 limitation.

Artist Evolution

Clickorz pic to embiggen

When I was a kid I couldn't figure out which of my hands was the dominate and it wouldn't have mattered much because I couldn't tell my right from my left most of the time. Writing a sentence was a challenge until a few of my teachers got together and spent considerable time helping me retrain my chaotic mind to control my limbs. I still suck at Street Fighter.

I've been working on doing the Artwork for a game for the Windows Phone with a friend. I've been a doodler since I was small because I was told that anything I did to train my hands would help me overcome my disability. I wasn't very imaginative back then so it was all Transformers and thinly veiled replicas of my favorite comic book heroes.

I was talking to my business partner and friend last night about the progress in the game when he told me he'd handed it off to someone he works with. Every time he does that my heart sinks a little bit because like most creatives I thrive on the thing I fear most, criticism. So far, including what was described to me last night, everyone likes the artwork for the game. That's a big deal for me because I've only been doing digital artwork for a year.

My cousin posted a blog to his google plus stream that had been maintained by a gentlemen who started at ground zero and eventually transformed himself into a remarkable artist. I haven't posted a lot of my work because I'm self conscious about it, but the blog made me go back and look at the work I'd done in the last year.

I've painted/drawn/rendered Master Red, a character in our game, dozens of times trying to get him to look right. I wanted him to portray magnetism and intelligence like so many of the good people I associate with on a daily basis. I wanted he and the other two masters to be inspiring when the player sees them on the screen of their phone and receive their mission orders.

I'll have to go back through all my files and find some for Masters Blue and Green, and some of the other characters we've introduced over time. I'm beginning to see why keeping your old artwork is as important as keeping your old writing. Looking back I can see a lot of things I did right day 1 and things I still do wrong to this very moment.

When I'm simply told "this is awesome" it does little to help me refine this skill I've had to reach out to. It does a lot to keep me going though because drawing is extremely tiring for me and I think has been the source of a lot of my eye strain recently. Any fuel to carry on burns the same, and I'm grateful.

Illustration Frustration

I started doing some illustrations for a small book I've been putting text toward for a long time. I feel pretty good about what's in the book, but the type of illustrations I want aren't completely inside my skill set. It's nothing fancy, just some small bugs that live in my mind.

I've done a fair number of extremely detailed drawings of these characters but I want what I put into the book to be far simpler and very small. I want there to be little Chitterlings in the corners of the pages, sitting at the edge of the text as though it were a ledge, and similar. I want them to be no larger than three times the height of the text unless they are standing next to a header.

It's a statement about the type of creative person I am in general. I like to make things complicated.

Trying to limit myself to as few lines as possible to craft the little guys on the pages. I'm allowing myself some liberty when it comes to rendering things they are carrying, but otherwise they need to be extremely simple. The book is part of my table top RPG I've been creating over the last five years and I'd like to finish it before the end of the year.

Maybe having illustrations at all is just a bad plan.

Gonna take one of my precious days to craft as many of these little guys as I can just to see if I can render enough of them that I like for the purpose. It feels like I spend way too much time with a tablet pen in my hand already. Being a one man crew on most of my projects requires doing a lot more of what I don't like as opposed to what I really enjoy.

Having some off-the-grid creative license in that regard comes with a price you pay in time.

Dear Me, Look Back Here In 112 Days

Looking in my Things App on my iPad this morning was pretty depressing. I'm writing this entry more to give myself something to look back on in four months than to illuminate anyone else that might read my blog regularly. Going into Fall and Winter my mental health generally suffers if I don't provide myself an even greater degree of focus.

I've got about 124,000 words left to write between two novels to make four total for the year. Collectively it's somewhere around 250,000 words that I'll have to edit and arrange for publish and make covers and such for. I've got a couple of people willing to help me with this but it will be a push to see it all happen before 2011 elapses.

Visting the Raging Rickshaw forums today made me realize just how much is left to complete our App for the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I think Dave and I have reduced the overall complexity of the game but added in several elements that will require a lot of additional artwork. I've got less than two months of real time to make that happen including the work that needs done on my novels into the equation.

I'm very close to completing several works for Storytelling Sciences and I'm not worried about the text required for that project. I've thousands of words waiting to go in and find a place. I've too much content if anything. I'd like to do some illustrations for the books though, something that might push the whole thing into next year. I need to find a play test table for the final form of the game, hopefully some folks that have never played it before.

I do a large amount of writing and creating for the purpose of recreation with my friends playing RPGs. It feels like a stretch to keep it all going and stay on schedule even after putting things into perspective with my Things App (awesome App btw). I would rather my work schedule suffered than my mental or physical health. My LARP crew has already stated that they want the game to continue after the first Chronicle is complete, and my RPG tables continue to contain interested folks.

Then there's the new Space Marine game. I will play through the whole thing on Normal mode before the end of the year. Somatic Dyslexia be damned.

Master Green

Master & Student MG04

It's gonna getcha.

Sword-erymanship

Graphic for the mobile game I'm working on. It's blocky-simple because at the back end, the visual will only be the size of a postage stamp on the screen. I did one for each of the weapon selections, sword, bow and staff.

Web Comic, iPad Style

It's cheesy, but if I used Sketchbook Pro to render, Photogene to letter, and Diptic to arrange, I could pretty easily craft my webcomic entirely on my iPad. As a gimmick, it would give me a little traction in the search engines and something else to put my name, links to my books, and so forth beneath. I just gotta pause long enough between the pages of the books I'm writing to actually paint some more Chitterlings. Being able to work on it anywhere will definitely help.

Hinth

Avatars of the Void should fill a person with dread, apprehension, and no small amount of fear. Most of them have never been human, and have no perspective relative to the temporal existence most finite beings are forced to live. Hinth, The Crone (pictured) quickly learned the value of such things in the wake of her sister's destruction trying to protect Green (also pictured). She will eventually becomes one the Penumbral Society's greatest allies.

Rendering Character

I wanted the Shades from my book to be otherworldly looking but have a lot of color. Humans granted a spark of the Primordial Shadow itself are going to look, well... Shadowy? Trying to render Numenarch with this thought in mind yielded a strange result. Not super happy with it because I know what everyone will likely think when they see it.

I think I'll try painting a shade that isn't Numenarch.

-- Sent from my Tech Envy Generator

Web Comics and Cheese

I wrote story for two 3-panel strips and one 6-panel strip and started drawing the backgrounds for my Chitterling web comic this morning. The whole process (I have no idea what I'm doing) seems simple enough. Draw one layer that acts as the background. Drop a layer over the top of that to sketch in the people and leave some room at the top for text bubbles. The truly difficult part has been how long it takes to tell a story in that medium. Makes you really think about every piece of dialogue, and every word a little more carefully when you can't just roll out ten pages of story in a morning.

I can totally see why it takes the established folks a couple days to a week to draw and post their stuff and why planning ahead would be important. I'm already scheming as to how I can save myself time by pre-drawing various expressions for the different characters, stock backgrounds, and the like. All things considered I think I'll need to figure out some way to host it once I have a few strips drawn.

Thought about just getting a Mobile Me account with Apple and using iWeb to post it until my Dreamweaver skills are a little sharper. Why does drawing always make me hungry?