So,  for about 8 months now I've been using a new laptop. My old baby, Aulis served me well, but two years near constant abuse was not very kind to the poor thing. The power connection on it is very fragile, so Aulis is a backup PC and remains stationary for the most part.

I currently work on a new tablet I've nicknamed Eris, another Toshiba, this time of the Portege line, since the satellites were discontinued.


Model: Toshiba M700 Portege Tablet PC
4GB ram,  2.2 GHZ dual core, 100 GB hard drive ect. ect.

This darlin' is much faster than my old laptop. I learned to deal with Visa, and all of its associated annoyances that are supposed to make your PC safer and all that jazz. I've discovered this to be a slight pile of crap, since I got a virus on the thing that I just can't seem to shake (irritatingly). Luckily all it seems to do is turn all my ads when I browse the internet into ads for viagra and 'male enhancement', which is annonying, but I can't afford to get it sent away during the school year - It's way too esential for me.

I felt a bit betrayed by my anti-virus actually.  I used Bitdefender for two years on Aulis, it never had so much as a sniffle that wasn't detected and immediately terminated by Bitdefender - and I was much less careful with my downloads than I am now. Such is life I guess.

That aside I am mostly happy with this machine. The heat dissipation on it is fantastic, and it runs at a pretty fair clip for anything I want to do. It's almost a kilo lighter  as well - A huge advantage since I lug it everywhere with me. Importantly, I can run Painter X with almost no trouble at all, although i don't actually have very much time to play around in Painter.

The comic is done pretty much entirely in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009, which is about $100 and perfect for my needs drawing and sketching wise. What weirds me out though, is that Sketchbook takes in the pen pressure data from the tablet screen perfectly, while painter can't seem to recognize it for crap. If I'm going to get serious about using painter, I'm going to have to get this resolved. Inked and greyscaled pages go straight to painter, because Painter is much more sophisticated when it comes to dealing with things like image resolution and converting to .gif and .jpeg files than Sketchbook is. Sometimes I'll use painter to lighten or darken certain panels if I feel that I didn't get the greyscale quite right the first time around.

I'm really looking forward to doing some real painting in Painter soon - I've got a piece planned that I think I can actually pull off, but I'm still not totally comfortable with the huge variety and selection of brushes available, and figuring out what to use and when.

My major complaint is that the pen calibration is not totally perfect. I think it's a function of the included touch screen, but I can't get the pen to calibrate so that the actual cursor lies directly under the pen point. It's annoying, but I've gotten used to it..

Progress: 31 Pages complete.
(My buffer is very, very slowly coming back. I want to be at least 4 weeks ahead before I start thinking about double posting ) 

As noted in the title of my journal, I work entirely in digital ink. So far, I've not been so good with the physical ink, as I fail at keeping blotches away from my drawings - but that's beside the point.

Like many a digital artist, I use a tablet, but unlike many a digital artist (and unlike oh... 99% of laptop users I know) I run a tablet PC. If you've never seen one before, you're in for a treat, because these suckers are awesomely cool. I don't just say this because I have one and have made it one of my secondary life goals to pimp the tablet pc revolution around the world, but because everyone else who sees it says so too.

I currently am working on a Toshiba Satellite R15 Tablet Pc, which I affectionately named Aulis.


Stats:

14.1 inch screen
1.7 GHz Pentium M processor
80 GB Hard Drive
512 MB of RAM
Windows XP Tablet Edition
Battery life: 3.5 hours average, but I can squeeze about 4.25 if I'm careful
Weight: 6.2 lbs



The swivel hinge in the middle allows me to rotate the screen and lay it flat against the keyboard. The tablet pen that comes with it works just like a mouse, only better, because with the aid of programs like Microsoft OneNote, I can handwrite all of my school notes directly into my computer. The software can recognize my handwriting and this makes my notes searchable. It also has a built in application to transform handwriting directly into typed text. (By the way, this can account for many of the capitalization errors that invariably appear when I start to do text in tablet mode).  As a student, I can't even begin to tell you how helpful this is to me, especially when taking notes with lots of diagrams or formulas.

Best of all however, I can treat my computer like a piece of paper. I like to play around in programs like Ink Art and Alias Sketchbook Pro, which run nicely with my processing power and offer tablet friendly interfaces. The problem I find with sketching in photoshop (besides that I can't afford CS2) is that it runs a little slow on my processor, and I can't really run anything like music or the internet in the background if I want good performance - that and the screen is about the same dimensions as your standard 8.5' x11' piece of paper, and the photoshop menus tend to take up way too much space on my little laptop screen when I've flipped it to tablet mode (When laid flat, the screen switches to a portrait orientation rather than the standard landscape one).

When I need it too, my Toshiba will function just like a normal laptop. The single hinge tends to be a little bit less sturdy than a screen with two hinges, but the Toshiba design is generally much more stable than other Tablet PCs I've seen, and even after an entire year of abuse, shows no sign of weakening or strain.

I personally have a great deal of affection for the Toshiba brand in general - I have few complaints about my laptop, apart from occasionally being a bit of a turtle compared to laptops in the same price range. Unfortunately, the tablet functionality came with a heavy price tag, which meant I had to sacrifice a bit in the way of processing speed in order to get a price at which my parents would bite. At home, my parents have a stoneage Toshiba so old that it still runs Windows 95 - but, most importantly, it still runs, not bad for a laptop that's got to be at least 10 years old. We've got desktops that have burned out faster than that, and I've seen my friends with Acer laptops gasp with despair as they search desperately for that letter 'C' that just dropped off their keyboard, and I've watched another friend's three year old Dell go into bluescreenofdeath fatal shutdown. This model is a few years old now, but still runs fine, and I haven't been exactly kind to it.

I could probably spend two posts explaining why Tablets are the next age in laptop computing, but let's just get on with it shall we?

Apart from that I tend to use little else. Most of the characters of the comic are drawn, at least partly in image from real life persons. If they happen to be someone I know (and many of the looks of the important plot building characters are) , I usually make them sit down for a few minutes while I stare at them determinedly and produce charicatures that look vaguely like them. If they're inconveniently in other provinces, based off of persons that are fictional/movie stars/movie stars that are fictional, I start working on the characters from photos, like this guy:




The resemblance is striking I know - but Mr Peck was the man in Jia's head for this one and I had to say I agreed with her. My goal is never to create an exact copy of the person, but a character inspired by their look or attitude. Sometimes this means that 110 pound, 5 foot three Redheads that live down the hall get turned into leggy double D firebrand songstresses A La Jessica Rabbit - but what can you do.

I also have a fedora and a dollar store toy gun lying around somewhere which will one day teach me how to draw hats and guns properly. I'm beginning to steal suit jackets off of my dad and brother for reference also Comic Progress:  Same as the last time I posted it  '^_^