Emanata is a great new app to discover indie comics and emerging artists. From today, your ol’ man is among those visual storytellers featured in the app – this, looking at all the others drawings, is a great honor.
Frederique will come every two weeks to Emanata. I have to admit, I’m really excited about working with this new format.
Get the app from the iTunes.
The first time I drew Frederique was about ten years ago, and since then, my preferred drawing technique didn’t change much: on paper, with ink or a black rollerball pen. As a disaster, I didn’t have access to a scanner the night the first episode should have been released, therefore I was forced to rethink my options – and I fired up the iPad.
From the first touch to the last: drawing on iPad, correcting vectors and finalizing graphics
There were of course plenty of other options: I could have reused my old drawings, or chose a more familiar digital tool like Photoshop or Illustrator. I wanted to go for something handmade though, and drawing with fingertips is quite similar to using a real pen – just that it has a built-in cheat, the option to correct the lines later. (But yeah, isn’t the eraser made for the same thing?)
This wasn’t the first time I used the iPad to do drawings though. I had a few goes with tons of apps, both raster- and vector-based. Because I wanted to have the comics in color, I went for the vector-based option, using neu.Notes+ (currently for 0.99$). This is a brilliant little app with great drawing tools and with a killer feature: it exports PDF files to Dropbox which can be directly fed into Illustrator from there – so that everything I draw with my fingers can be later edited with a professional tool that I use on a daily basis.
Tools optimized for touchscreens (neu.Notes) and trackpads (Illustrator)
Even with the already known tools, I’ve spent about 8 hours on the first episode: drawing, redrawing, checking on the computer, redrawing and finalizing the vectors on the iPad (unfortunately at this time, the PDF files cannot be transferred back), correcting the vectors in Illustrator, coloring, adding shadows and more details, and exporting the whole lot from Photoshop.
Since then I made ten episodes and some more images, practiced the finger-drawing and optimized the workflow a lot – now I’m down to around 4 hours per episode, which is about pen-and-ink-time. And there’s something even better to this process. Thanks to the vector-based graphics, I have a lot more options open: maybe one day we will see all these characters filled with life – and dancing in a cartoon.
When I had a short visit near Lilienfeld in Austria, the news were all about a young guy, who went missing after a concert on a school holiday’s evening. Franz Kendler has not returned home to this day, but there are other things to the search that are the mention worth.
Fotos: BI Werner Planer, FF Wiesenfeld (from this article)
The villages in the area are those small ones with only a few hundred inhabitants, and since this case was the most important news around, I heard the gossips right after crossing the town sign. Therefore, most of the information I had were guesses – ranged from optimistic to pessimistic, and even some dark ones involving pedophiles, a stranger immigrant girl’s family, alcohol overload, new kinds of drugs, and my favorite: the Chinese mob.
Gossips is nothing new though. What I’ve found interesting is how small part modern technology was playing here. Even in a world with smart phones, all day data and network connection, the most peaces of information coming from these devices was, where the phone was last connected to the network – for me, this was rather scary.
A few years ago, as an ad creative, I was working with a worldwide security services group on a product for parents: it was a simple alert system for young children, with a permanent GPS connection and a 15-minute response unit. Since then, this technology got really cheap: nowadays you can follow your friends on Latitude, check your iPhone’s position via iCloud, and there are apps specially designed for parents.
Only one thing left unchanged: if you are alone with no one listening to those signals, even after a few hours, there is not a lot of chance to track you down. It seems to be therefore that to be on the safe side, you are better of to take some friends with you everywhere – all those apps and fancy devices are good for gaining false confidence only.
Without friends looking after us, we better don’t get lost – otherwise the only chance left may be a milk carton campaign.