Sketch Blog for real

Wow ok so I’m actually making a "sketchblog" post. Woo!

I’ve got a tablet pc laptop for work and I’ve been thinking about buying my own. My work one is cool but it’s really slow. It’s not because it has bad parts. It’s brand new with a fair amount of ram and a fast processor. But unfortunately the drive is encrypted so every write action to the drive is slowed down by the encryption. I’ve especially been frustrated with Painter. It’s so slow that its unusable when working in really high resolutions.

What resolution and dimensions do you guys work in when doing digital works? I usually do 600 dpi in 8 x 10 inches. A couple of people tell me I work at too high a res but I don’t think this is too high. At this resolution, I can print it on 11×17 posters at 300 dpi. Actually sometimes I work at 800 dpi if i have something i think i’m going to print large.

So I’m trying to decide what kind of laptop I want. I may decide not to get one and just use my work one. But I’m not sure yet. But anyway, while I was researching laptops I came across this forum post where this guy mentioned a program called ArtRage, stating it was a must have freeware for all artists using tablet pcs. I checked it out and downloaded it. Within 20 minutes of loading it I fell in love with it. It’s really light weight so it runs well on slow machines. It’s not all bloated like Photoshop and Painter. I decided to invest $25 and get the paid version of ArtRage because I loved it so much.

So now I’m doing some sketching with it. I’m trying to sketch something every other day. Even if the drawing isn’t particularly creative. Just need to keep my hand moving. My first entry was this one: [thumb17723]. Today I have my second entry…

[thumb17745]

Today I had some time to draw and wasn’t sure what to draw. I looked around me and saw a Viking hat that a coworker had put near my desk earlier that day. So I thought, hey I’ll draw myself with the hat on. Like a sort of silly self portrait. Why the heck not?

Next time I’ll try out one of those idea generators.