July 27, 2011

Quacks & Snacks

I was delighted to open up a new copy of High 5 and find my two page spread for 'Snacks & Quacks' in the August issue. The printing came out almost as I imagined it might.

In the real magazine there are lots of great little details. Every little duckling and bug's wing... all in colorful photoshop rendering.

It was all done in pencil line mostly... with some scanned splotches of real paint and scanned textures.




July 25, 2011

Another Kwik iPad tryout...


Yesterday I finally got the hang of Kwik so that for part of the afternoon I could actually control it! Believe me, nobody would be more surprised to see things actually work.

So now I'm halfway knowing what to do... but more importantly what NOT to do! Here's the new little three page app sample I did up. These are just cutout stand ins for the finish art. So the first stage is quite sketchy, exactly like making a book dummy.

It's lots of fun.

July 18, 2011

Like a kid in a candy store...



Dipping my toe into the world of e-book apps... what a bunch of fun! I felt a lot like a kid in the candy store after figuring out how Kwik and Corona work to transform a photoshop file into a living, breathing ebook app.

For me the motivating factor in wading through the technical mumbo-jumbo is the experience of seeing my artwork floating around on the screen like magic. And it turns out the technical side really isn't all that hard if you know already know how to work in photoshop.

More magic comes from the ease of transforming voices with Garageband. Adding in music and sound effects really has the bookmaker thinking outside the box.

Oh boy! Enter the world of animated ebook apps with sound and voiceovers. All done by moi!


July 14, 2011

The 12 Days of Christmas Book Blog

The 12 Days of Christmas Book Blog has been under construction. Blogger makes it easy to transform a regular blog into sort of a 'web-site blog' with the addition of tabs.

I find that some of the features still don't work on the 'new blogger'. For those one has to switch back to the 'old blogger'. But it's fun to improvise new designs and see how they turn out.

One simply cannot beat the pricing schedule of 'free'. I hope it will prove useful in lining up lots of school tours. It should be going 'live' before too long. Only 164 shopping days left until Christmas!


July 7, 2011

Another step by step...

Photobucket

Yet another step by step animation from the studio.

These are so much fun I think I'll have to purchase a movie making software app to show some 'live action' film of drawing and clicking.