Great Ways To Work

I am going to be featuring great illustration guides for those of you who would like to see how digital illustration can be done. Also when they are available I will link to illustrators guides on getting their artwork to make money for them. Here is the start. An excellent guide on how to use Adobe products to create great pieces. I think that you should be able to adapt this process to any of the free tools I have mentioned. For example inkscape or Xara.

Open publication - Free publishing - More ilustration

My Paint - Fabulous and Free

I was recently looking through tutorials for Blender 3d for my other Blog The Freeware Animation School. When I came across this fantastic software called Mypaint. I have to say I love it. I have been keen to find a paint package that I can touch up my scanned artwork with, that ran on multi platforms and was free. Well this is it folks, It would have to be one of the best resources I have found in a while. The video I have here may have chintzy sax muzak but it sure highlights the programs ease of use and control. If you were to set up a tablet PC with Ubuntu, Wine Fotosketcher and MyPaint you would have a studio on the go.


Get it here - Link

Show Your Work in Style

A magazine style flipping gallery for me is the coolest way to view artwork, especially when its my own. I have been meaning to update my personal website with exactly this in mind. So I searched high and low for a free app to do the job and I found an open source app that converts a library of jpeg images into a lovely online page flipper. I just love the ease of use. Soon people will be flipping through my online magazines of my artwork. All free and available here http://www.megazine3.de/

Art Of Illusion Instead of Anime Studio Pro

Ok, you may have read earlier that I was about to trial AOS as a substitute for ASP. I forgot to give you links so I will give them here. http://www.artofillusion.org/ This is basically a free multi platform 3D editing app that I thought would be worth investigating for TFI. My aim is to test the possibilities of using AOI as an Anime Studio Pro substitute. The first thing to do is get the software and download all the plugins and scripts available online so that AOI has its full potential released. You can do this by going to Tools - Scripts and plugins manager - Install. Select the "Select all" button and wait a moment then choose the "Install all selected files" button. You will get some warnings along the way. I just kept clicking "yes" until the install was complete. Once it has finished close AOI and then Reopen it. It will have changed from the old interface --->

To this newer interface ---->

I wanted to only have one window showing you may like the quad screens but if you want to do as I did you need to click and drag the boundary line running down the right side of the three smaller view screens and drag it all the way to the left. You will end up with a screen the same as mine. unfortunately you will need to do this every time you open AOI----->

Pixel to DPI Calculator

Not every app out there has the facility to convert pixels to dpi. Years ago I knocked one together and posted it on Geocities for people to download. But since Geocities demise it vanished without a trace. I have it somewhere on a floppy but it isn't recoverable. So as I recently needed to calculate some odd shaped images for a client, I went looking on the web for an alternative freebie. I did discover a few but these two seemed easiest to use and of course they where free and accessible to most OS's, that is so long as you are using wine on Linux. Mihov DPI to Pixel Calculator is virtually a clone of my app. Maybe there is only one way to make one of these. It is straight forward and does the trick in a jiffy. Put in your desired size, pick the dpi, then calculate. I highly recommend it.
You can find it here. http://www.mihov.com/sw/en/dc.php


The second is an online tool found at Tiporama here. http://tiporama.com/tools/pixels_inches.html Its just as simple and quick.

Creating Image Source PDFs in a Couple of Clicks

I have often been asked to provide a "Tag' sheet for potential clients so they can have copies of my work as a catalog for archiving. This helps when clients/agents are looking for an illustrator for a certain project but want to flip through a whole bunch of work quickly. They don't have to remember who had what style when. They just flip through the pages of a PDF and if something stirs them they take down the details and call you if its your style or image that gets the job. PDF's can be a real pain to create and no busy artist wants to be doing something uninspiring for hours.
In those times its good to know there are tools that do the work for you. Image-to-PDF-Converter-Free is great for these kinds of projects. Just point it at the folder with the images you need converted and push a couple of buttons and your done. Yes its free too

Art of Illusion V's Anime Studio Pro

I am currently looking at Art of Illusion as a tool for creating animations similar to Anime Studio Pro (ASP). It dawned on me that although this program doesn't do every thing that ASP or Moho as it used to be called, can do. It does offer some parallel tool sets that can be made to create animations for TV or Youtube. I think the bones system can deform images as well as ASP. As it is fairly simple to use I think that most animators wanting a bones based 2D animation tool should find Art of Illusion quite a good alternative. I will attempt to post some tutorials along the way.