I needed to come up with a small 16×16 web icon to denote adding or taking an action to/against an audit and so came up with the idea that a hand being stuck up in the air might just work pretty well in this particular instance.

So out came the Genius tablet and before you knew it, there was a nice 48×48 waving hand in a simplified (but rough) black outline with a minor flesh tone shading on a transparent background.

Resized down to its intended 16×16 dimensions and voila – the perfect little take action hand icon, which I’ve slipped up here as a .png image file together with its Photoshop .psd source in case it is of any use to you.

Enjoy!

Download: Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

So another quick black pen on normal printer paper, hastily scribbled down in front of my work keyboard while my mind happily drifted into problem solving mode to deal with some issues raised on one of our important projects.

As you can see from the subject matter, no doubt my brain was craving some good wholesome coffee, but considering that one now has to walk all the way downstairs just to make a cup, it might not exactly be getting all that much in the near future.

Certainly nowhere near the levels it has grown used to!

The small black and white drawing has been scanned in and blown up using my nifty little Canon LiDE 100 Scanner and then moved over into Photoshop where my Genius tablet and I happily coloured it in, before uploading it here.

Smooth.

The Enabler – 3 May 2010. Black Pen on Paper. Digital Colouring.

Okay. So now I have my scanner. Which means I can put a black pen on paper and make a quick scribble in say ten to fifteen minutes. Then I take that sketch home with me, pop it into the scanner and bring the black and white digital copy into Photoshop, where I get to play brush master and bring the black and white to life.

The result?

Not bad for my first effort back behind the pen if I say so myself. Juices of creativity, flow damn it flow!

Despair — 21 April 2010. Black Pen on Paper. Digital Colouring.

Alright, now we’re in business!

My delivery from Take 2 arrived two days ago and I am now a proud owner of a beautiful black Canon LiDE 100 standalone scanner.

I mentioned the reasons for wanting a scanner previously in these pages and now that I have one, I can made the jump backwards of returning to producing my art on paper and then transferring it to the digital world instead of working completely digitally from step 1. Needless to say, this should bring some more natural lines to the table and I’m excited to be putting pen to paper once again!

And now on to the scanner itself.

It is actually quite a sexy piece of hardware you know, light, slim and sleek in it’s black finish, though it does suffer a bit from those horrible looking grey plastic buttons they went and planted on the front of the thing.

On the performance front, the Canon LiDE 100 is one of the cheaper models available so it won’t exactly knock your socks off in terms of speed, but it delivers solid and relatively fine grain scanning with numerous quality options available to you through the bundled application.

It can handle 2400x4800dpi resolution with 48-bit colour and the four cheesily named “EZ” buttons allow you to copy, scan, email or PDF at the touch of a button. The scanning lid is one of those Z-lid contraptions that allows you to deal with thicker document scans, though it probably wouldn’t handle something hefty like War & Peace of course.

As for my favourite part of the whole device, the scanner runs off a standalone Hi-Speed USB connection, meaning that it transfers data through and draws power from a single USB cable – no extra power cables lying around to trip over on the floor then!

So in short, I’m very happy with this purchase that works well and looks rather nice on my desk. The only qualm I do have is the fact that Canon has released no Linux drivers for the scanner and because they keep the driver code proprietary, no third party has yet been able to reproduce a usable driver for the Canon LiDE 100 under Linux – which of course means that is bye bye Ubuntu box and hello Windows laptop for all my scanning now.

Frost Giants. They’re big, they lumber and they seem to be made up completely of ice. A staple of fantasy no matter where one looks, it does however become quite tricky to remove them from the natural, frozen habitat. After all, no one likes a big puddle in the middle of their floor – though I guess in this period of global warming and drought, all that extra water may not be such a bad thing after all!

And on a completely different note, that’s it, the end of my re-run comics. Next Monday we move on to the new stuff baby! (not that the lack of practice has improved my scribbles mind you!)

I’ve decided that I need to lay my hands on a scanner.

The reason is pretty simple. A while back I moved to the straight digital path after laying my hands on a drawing tablet to use at home for my own purposes. Doing everything via the digital route definitely has its advantages in terms of speed for time to completion, but in the process I’ve noticed that what I produce is well… diminished in quality to say the least.

The problem of course lies rooted in a couple of factors, so I’ll try and lay them out here. First off is the whole breaking of the visual from the hand movements thing that comes with using a tablet, followed by the fair inability to naturally change hand orientation at will. Now of course, these could be circumvented by using a tablet system like an Apple iPad or even shelling out for a Wacom Cintiq product, but seeing as this is completely a free time hobby which I don’t pay all that much attention to, shelling out that kind of cash just doesn’t seem justifiable to me or my wife! After those two biggies, next comes the feel of the whole affair (nothing really beats pencil on paper), as well as to an extent the joy of seeing your work right in front of you, no matter where you may be.

Sure there are some great software and hardware solutions to tackle all of these, but like I said, I’m not really willing to spend a lot of money on this hobby of mine, so those are pretty much out of the question.

So the solution is of course to go back to pencil and paper, sketch out the drawing and then scan it in, before finally switching to the good old tablet to handle “inking”, colouring and of course lettering.

A slower process, but one which should definitely make the resulting pencils look a whole lot less stiff.

But here’s my bugbear then. Why in the world are standalone scanners so expensive?!? They’ve definitely gone up in price since the last time I purchased one (which was way back when admittedly), and are actually more expensive to buy in the standalone format than as part of an all-in-one scanner/fax/printer combo!

I’ve already got a printer, I don’t need another. All I want is a scanner you know…

Way back in October 2007 I was commissioned to come up with a logo for the newly established Environmental Policy Research Unit that fell under the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Cape Town. Since I was recently asked to dig up those old designs and send it through to a new administrator for that project, I thought it a good idea to post it up here as a reminder to myself that this was also something I found myself doing in those bad old days when one still needed to scrape together pennies from which ever direction they came, no matter what work you were required to do in order to get them!

As you can see, the accepted logo was a pretty simple silhouette-based piece of work that highlighted the environmental nature of the research unit through the symbolic use of an majestic tree in front of a setting (or rising) sun. I then used a nice emboldened font of their official abbreviation and in order to explain the abbreviation further (because of the newness of the unit), I placed the full text of the name in an umbrella view over the tree and sun symbol.

(Below the logo you can see the web banner I proposed for their standardised site design.)

Looking at it now, I can’t help but think that I still quite like the design I came up with. It’s not particularly colourful, but it is bold, gives you a good idea of what the unit is about and tells you exactly just who it is whom you currently are reading about!

Accepted EPRU Logo

Proposed web banner using above EPRU logo

You might laugh at this one, but a lot of cities do have ordnances in place that forces people to pick up after their dogs or face rather stiff penalties – though one is left to wonder just who is responsible for all that illegal dumping left behind by strays then…

Final note, Judge Dredd is awesome. If you haven’t picked it up, do yourself a favour and grab a copy of either Judge Dredd Megazine or 2000AD – the absolute best in British black humour comics. (Though I kind of miss the fully painted strip days. Computer colouring just doesn’t carry the same sort of charm with it).

Oh, and if you are feeling a little lost, here’s the info link creep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd

At the height of the global economic meltdown, this was most certainly true. However, in an era of government bank loans and propping up of failing companies, who knows? Still, I kind of liked that short moment in time when I didn’t feel like bankers were screwing me over any more.

Pity that feeling has now gone again.

(And yes, that Ferrari looks rather shitty. But the pigeon doesn’t look half bad if you ask me!)

Another dated cartoon finds itself on the House of C, this one pulled from the original CodeUnit blog and marked the 1000th post on that particular site. Needless to say, there isn’t much of a joke to be found here, but at least you get a cartooning of me from behind. You know, from when I was all muscular-like…

(And I promise, nearly at the end of these comic re-runs. We’re getting there people, we’re getting there!)