New Project in the Works

It's been ages since I posted! Not for lack of projects, rather, it's been a lack of time! I never knew how much time school aged kids & senior care could eat up!! My boys are absolutely in love with soccer - we have practices Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday and games on Saturday & Sunday.  Regardless, I've been up to all kinds of paper doll fun!

For anyone who hasn't already heard, I've been helping out with both the Paperdoll Review and Paper Doll Studio magazine! Sometimes it's minor art editing in Photoshop, sometimes it's creating a graphic header for an article... No matter what it is, I love the variety of projects!

My biggest project at the moment is a collaboration with David Wolfe!! You can read David's take on the project here and see some in-process samples from the forthcoming book.  It was such an honor to be asked and it's been a thrill to work on it! The basic outline is this: David created two paper dolls, drew all of the outfits for the dolls, and I colored them in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.

Because it can be hard to explain exactly how I work, I've put together a little video of my technique.

That video condenses down 45 minutes or so into a brisk speedpaint.  There's editing to be done after all of that, but it's a good run-through of what I did on most pages.

So why Sketchbook Pro?

I've known about Sketchbook Pro for a while but as of May 2018, it became a free program so I thought I'd check it out again. For the Stripes book, I really wanted a hand-made feeling but with all of the advantages of digital art.  Sketchbook Pro is easily the best natural media simulator I've ever used: it's lightweight so it starts up quickly and there's no lag time drawing, it's intuitive and easy to just jump right into, there's a built-in Copic color palette, and so many more features that I just haven't had the chance to try yet! I really love it.  And it only took me a couple of hours to pick up. I like ArtRage and will continue to use it, but for this project Sketchbook Pro was just the better choice.

I chose to work vertically in Sketchbook.  I usually work horizontally and zoom & pan as needed, but Sketchbook feels so natural that it just made sense to turn my computer.  Here's the basic work station - it can all be customized! At the top, there's a menu bar. On the left side, a tools palette and the Copic colors as well as one of the two brush pucks for adjusting brushes on the fly.  To the right, my layers palette. Sketchbook is designed for touch based surfaces and runs on pretty much everything.  I highly suggest checking it out!

That's about it for the moment. I have some Stripes edits to work on and I'll post this month's collaboration paper doll outfit next week. And soccer. Ugh. At least they love it!