Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

Another brief video in my series introducing some great new features in Photoshop CS4 for artists, cartoonists, illustrators and anyone else who sketches or draws using Photoshop.

This video features the excellent new keyoard shortcuts that allow you to drag-resize the size of the brushes using the mouse pointer.

Continue reading 'Video: Photoshop CS4 Drag-Resize Brush Keyboard Shortcut'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Wacom has a new online service and free companion software tool download called  Bamboo Dock. The apps available so far are basic — a drawing/doodling app, a map you can draw on and a handwriting recognition app. The others I couldn’t demo as a Wacom Bamboo serial number is required.

The online service is a sort of virtual sketchpad, allowing you to doodle, draw, scrapbook and upload files to “spaces” which are like collections, and inside of each one can add multiple canvases with different contents, themes and such.

I am having a hard time imagining a use for the online portion, but the companion apps look like they might be handy and should be interesting to see how things progress as new tools are developed/released.

Continue reading 'Wacom: Bamboo Dock'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I know what you’re thinking — Google already has an image search. But TinEye is different.

TinEye’s image search works by uploading an image or giving TinEye a URL for a webpage or image link. From there, TinEye uses proprietary search magic to compare the uploaded image to it’s ever-increasing database of images. Some sort of digital fingerprint is generated for images it collects as it scours the web, and these digital fingerprints are used for the comparison. The results are quite impressive.

Continue reading 'TinEye — Amazing ‘Similar Image’ Search Engine'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Yeah, I know – it looks kinda weird. And what is the SmudgeGuard exactly? As you can see from the product shot, it’s kind of a glove – one that only covers the pinky finger and the meaty area of the palm below.

Originally designed for artist lefties who were always smudging their work when drawing their palms across their artwork, it’s also useful for any artist working in pencil, charcoal or related media where a hand-drag can smudge the artwork. And, interestingly enough, it’s also quite useful for Wacom graphics tablet users.

Continue reading 'SmudgeGuard – Handy Accessory For Wacom Users & Graphic Artists'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Symmetries from Earthlinksoft Software is an interesting symmetrical vector object generator tool.

The control system is very intuitive, requring no knowledge of how to manipulate vector paths. While simplistic, it gives one a high level of control over exploring interesting symmetrical objects. I did find that there seemed to be a bit of a genre of shapes that were the calling card for this tool, but maybe I just didn’t play with it enough.

Symmetries does not generate tiled patterns, but rather single vector objects, which then can be pasted into the vector software of your choosing for futher editing. The demo mode doesn’t allow this, so I couldn’t test it.

Continue reading 'Symmetries – Vector Path Software Tool'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

A plugin that I always forget to tout, since the functionality it provides seems so intrinsic to Illustrator once it’s installed, I forget it’s a third-party enhancement.

Select Menu for Adobe Illustrator (Mac and Windows, free) from Graffix Software is available for every version of Illustrator from 8 on up to CS3. It adds additional selectable items under the Select -> Objects menu.

This plugin really comes in handy at the production stage of prepping your art, allowing you to find all sorts of items that you need to preflight. It especially comes in handy after flattening transparency, such as when you export art to an older version of Illustrator. I find lots of klunky and open paths all over the place after flattening transparency, and I couldn’t imagine how much of a pain in the neck it would be to clean up art without Select Menu.

Continue reading 'Essential Adobe Illustrator Plug-in: Select Menu'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Just a quick post to let all you Wacom users out there know that a Wacom driver which supports compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now available. The new version is 6.05-3.

Continue reading 'Wacom Tablet Driver for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Released'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Although I don’t yet own one, the Wacom Cintiq flat-screen graphics tablets are exceedingly drool-worthy and I will own one in the near future. Everytime I talk to a Cintiq user or read an artist’s blog raving about one it only makes the waiting more difficult.

For those unaware, the Cintiq is a fusion of Wacom’s phenomenal graphics tablets with a flat-screen monitor — allowing one to draw right on the screen. Awesome.

Continue reading 'Wacom Expands Cintiq Line With New (Smaller, Cheaper) Flat Screen Tablets'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Just stumbled across these handy Mac OS X software applications to help designers and artists simulate the effects of color blindness on-screen: Sim Daltonism and Color Oracle.

Sim Daltonism works as a floating palette which converts an area under your mouse cursor to the selected type of color blindness — it works similar to the Apple Digital Color Meter sampling utility. There are 8 different types of color blindness to test. Color Oracle works as a menubar item which converts the entire monitor to the selected mode of color blindness, but only offers the three most common forms.

Continue reading 'Color Blindness Software Tools for Artists'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

The more I try out image editors Pixelmator & Acorn, the more Acorn’s simplicity and new perspective on the interface grows on me. Pixelmator is looking to be just about perfect for those people who need a Photoshop Elements style app with low overhead at a sweet price point.

Acorn, on the other hand, seems to be carving out a new niche, and developer Gus Mueller has shown in some of the details that’s he’s not trying to compete with Photoshop (or even Pixelmator), rather he’s attempting to do something new & unique. From the single, unified tools palette to the Option & Control key resizing & crop features (with the live pixel dimension display on the bottom left of the window frame) to the live brush size on the brush slider, Mueller demonstrates that he’s been using graphics software, he’s been frustrated with some things, and he’s thought of a way to make it painless, effortless and intuitive.

Once you’ve worked a bit in Acorn with some of these novel approaches to old habits, you’ll soon wonder why it was never done this way before.

Continue reading 'Acorn: The Leatherman Tool of Image Editors'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.