Drawing Breath » Illustration

My all new business site

Richard — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 12:39:46 +0000

Today is the official launch of the latest version of my cartoon illustration web site. This is a really big redesign; I have completely restructured the entire site, and thrown away a lot of superfluous content.

I also have a completely new portfolio, using the open source Gallery software. This has allowed me to arrange my illustrations much more logically into smaller albums, which should make older work more accessible.

Please take a look at the new site, and let me know what you think in the comments, the feedback forum, or by contacting me.

Funny bunny

Richard — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 09:48:57 +0000

Russ just sent me a link to an excellent bit of Flash animation. The compression on the audio makes it hard to catch the words, but the animation is just brilliant.

Adobe announces Creative Suite 2

Richard — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 09:23:29 +0000

Adobe has just announced the release date and feature set for the next version of their Creative Suite, and after reading about the new features, I’m already itching to get my hands on Illustrator CS2.

I’m currently using an evaluation version of Illustrator CS, which offers significant improvements over Illustrator 10. But the new CS2 features look set to blow the first CS release out of the water.

The most significant, and the one that really has me salivating, is the Live Paint feature, which allows you to tint and shade artwork using overlaid paths that remain editable. This looks amazing, and could revolutionise the way I colour my images.

Adobe have finally integrated their old Streamline tracing application into Illustrator, with a feature called Live Trace. I never understood why they didn’t do this after they discontinued development of Streamline. I just hope that the results from Live Trace are more accurate than Streamline. It will have to be very good to compete with Freesoft Silhouette, which is what I use at the moment to convert my ink line art scans into EPS format.

The new stroke options look fantastic too. Finally you can position stokes outside, inside or centred to a path. About bloody time too!

It looks like I might skip Illustrator CS altogether now and upgrade to CS2 as soon as it is available.

Newer, faster, better, stronger

Richard — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:27:07 +0000

I’m currently working on a large and detailed map for a new BBC project, which involves producing a large and detailed map of Glasgow in Adobe Illustrator 10. Now I love Illustrator, and use it extensively every day, even though it can be a bit twitchy now and then (I’ve learned to save regularly).

The problem is, the image I’m creating at the moment is already over 2.1Mb (most images I produce in Illustrator top out at about 700Kb), and it is only about half finished. Illustrator is already starting to get really sluggish, despite the fact that I have over 2Gb of RAM in an 867MHz Dual Processor G4, so things can only get worse as the file grows; I’ve had one “unexpected quit” today when trying to paste a large selection into the file.

It is becoming clear that I need something faster to work with, be it software or hardware. I’ve already priced up a replacement Powermac on the Apple Store, and that comes to over £1600 before I add the extra hard drive space and RAM that I need to match my current setup.

The cheaper option is to upgrade to Illustrator CS, which I believe runs faster on Mac OS X. This would certainly be less of a strain on my bank balance. I’m going to install the Illustrator CS Tryout when I have a chance, but if anyone has any anecdotal evidence of improved performance, or other reasons to upgrade, please let me know in the comments.