Meet Mr Wabbit, Brushes style...
Categories: artwork, and-another-thing, general-stuff
Tags: comics, Brushes, iPad, Artwork
Date: 11 May 2010 12:24:45
Ok so: playing with the iPad as I am my intention was to draw a Wabbit being wabducted by an Alien. As mentioned earlier it's the image that I tend to do with young people as a 'you can learn to draw' style pic because the nuts and bolts of it are so easy to pick up and I always like to see who does what to the two principle characters.
Life going according to plan, as it rarely does, I've only done the Brushes version before heading straight back to do the Galactus and Hulk images also attached below. I have done the beginnings of a Wabbit image in Layers and in Sketchbook Pro, haven't really managed to get into Art Studio but each have their glitches and oddities that leave me quitting the programs in frustration. I will finish all of these pictures at some point but for the moment lets start with Brushes and what I've found while drawing on it:
First off the larger screen on the iPad is a joy to draw on. I've not used a stylus yet but it immediately feels more free and open than the iPod Touch' smaller screen. This is a good and bad thing for me as the tightness of the smaller screen informed what I was doing a fair extent but the ability to just sit and draw on something more akin to a medium sized sketchpad is intensely liberating.
Secondly oh boy do layer modes help you in drawing and colour correcting. Shadows set to overlay or multiply look richer and more vibrant than simple layers placed over each other. Similarly some of the new brush presets on offer are fabulous. One in particular - a noise brush - I'm finding very useful to add texture to pictures and others look like they'll be very useful in the cross hatching and detailing moments of making a picture. Also it's lovely to have a couple more layers to play with but I suspect I'd say that no matter how many layers were offered.
Downsides? A couple: The playback animation feature stops at a minute or so and has no controls to stop, rewind, hive off a picture from any given frame on playback etc. Merging layers breaks the layer style options (which makes sense, it does that in Photoshop too and it would be hard to make a layer that could both overlay and multiply but it's a shame when you hit the layer limit and cannot merge different areas) and I keep clicking on the wrong icons for brush, eraser and options which I wonder whether I'll become used to or whether they could be a little more intuitive. The shortcuts for the software have always been a cause for concern as well with it being as easy to go back to the Gallery as it is to change from paintbrush to eraser. Lastly it's a huge shame, one that I hope can be remedied soon, that the gallery cannot be more sensibly organised into folders. That would help me a lot, although I suspect that I'm unusual in having 500 or so pics in my iPod Touch version of the app.
Also lastly ( :) ) there seems to be no wi-fi connectability this time - you just have to email a file to yourself.
That's a lot of negatives and that's unfair. Brushes is a BLAST and, at version 1 of the iPad version it's a corker and by far my favourite art app of them all. Yes it's missing some of the lovely features from the competition: I'd like it to output PSD files, Sketchbook's mirror facing drawing tool is lovely, Art Studio's dry brush affecting of prior strokes is fantastic and so on... But Brushes has the better UI, a smooth movement of digital paint on digital canvas and the more sensibly arranged workflow.
More pics to come, especially when time allows.
