bug report: “unwanted toads in my brush palette”

Peggy
March 23, 2016

So there’s this side effect of Adobe’s attempt to retool Illustrator into something that can be driven entirely by a touchscreen: an uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of your brush palette.

This has annoyed me for a while, as I am pretty committed to driving it with keyboard and stylus. It’s not a huge annoyance, but it’s just this… intrusion… on my otherwise neatly-organized files. I finally decided to write it up as a bug.

In other news, this Purple Arrow I picked up at American Mary the other day on a budtender’s recommendation is some pretty good stuff.

******BUG******
Concise problem statement:

An uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of the Brush palette for every single document, including ones that predate touch devices. On my Macbook Air, which is not a touch device, with files that have never been loaded on a touch device.

Steps to reproduce bug:

Start Illustrator on a computer with no touchscreen.
Load a file or create a new one.
Try to edit the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.
Try to delete the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.

Results:

The Touch Calligraphic Brush stays there at the top of your brushes palette. It refuses to move. Refuses to let you change its settings. It mocks you every time you look at the brush palette, an unasked-for, unwanted squatter in the middle of your tools, like a toad that’s plopped itself down in the middle of your pencil box. It’s polite, as toads go. It doesn’t demand you feed it flies, it doesn’t excrete all over a work in progress and ruin it, it doesn’t even croak. But it’s always there right in the middle of where your tools are. And sometimes you put your hand on it when you reach for a pencil without really looking, and it’s all clammy, and gross, and why is this toad in the middle of my pencil box, taking up space I could keep drawing tools instead? When you call the people who make the pencil box, they tell you that, oh, yes, the toad has to be there for the benefit of people working in the exciting new medium of toad secretions, so that when they try to use a toad to draw with, there’s always a toad there, and this just leaves you (as an artist working in the medium of pen and ink) rather baffled as to why this means everyone has to have a toad in their pencil case now.

I mean, also sometimes the pencil box summons this five inch tall giraffe made of fire who burns your drawing up, and that’s something both you and the people who made this magical pencil box are more concerned with, but still. I just keep on putting my hand on this toad sometimes, and it’s just moderately annoying on a constant low level.

Expected results:

The Touch Calligraphic Brush acknowledges that its presence may be unnecessary or unwanted for some people, and lets you edit and delete it.

Or even better, perhaps the Touch Calligraphic Brush never even appears if you’re not on a touch device.

edit: In 2023, I put this in the new Illustrator bug/feature request system. It’s 2024 and this toad is still there, and I still touch it by accident now and then.

I hate costume design

Peggy
March 19, 2016

Tonight I went by Iris and Nero’s place and watched the Speed Racer movie. Which is fucking amazing, it’s one long eyegasm, and think I need to see it again on a bigger screen than their TV. Before the movie, I spent some time pondering uniforms for Parallax.

I started with intent of redesigning the Federacracy outfits. Tried some asymmetrical stuff because I feel like a good Space Pilot outfit is often dramatically asymmetrical. I really like the swirly accent on the hip pocket in the upper right on this first page and might play with that some more…

But I ended up going with the same blue jacket with two light stripes down the front center that I had in the pitch. Just couldn’t think of anything that worked better. I may try another round later. (Looking at where I ended up with the Union flight jackets, I think I might want to either stay with straight stripes, or maybe try curves/circles as a design motif so as to contrast with the Union triangles.)

And then I shifted over to the other side, who the asymmetrical uniforms worked a lot better on – they’re the Creepy Post-Human Space Goths.

There are a lot of ways to make a coat interestingly asymmetrical. I did some image searching for inspiration and think I finally got something good, as marked with arrows at the bottom of that page up there. (Note to self: maybe tweak it so that the three buttons are in a line.)

Tried a profile and back view, think it works. Needs a little more red on the back but I can’t decide how yet. Will see how it goes when I do a second round on the pitch bible art.

In summation, I hate costume design.

I still need to redesign the spaceships, too. I’m not happy with the existing drawings of the Whalesong and the Spinward, or with the Tactical Pants or the Combat Armatures – I’m probably gonna completely drop that link to its roots in my guest strip for Gabe’s comic in favor of something that better fits the themes of the show. There’s something better waiting for me to find it before I can do presentation boards for the pilot.

It’s coming together, though. Nick and I have been tossing it back and forth, and we now have enough A and B plot ideas that we can shuffle them together into about a season’s worth of single-paragraph synopses of episodes.

If the pitch becomes A Thing then I will probably be asking a few friends if they are interested in taking some money to iterate on costume and ship designs for a bit. Because I feel like I want to do this the way George Lucas made Star Wars: by getting a bunch of awesome people to contribute to a big ol’ cauldron of stone soup.

Potrzebie!

Peggy
March 18, 2016

Black metal pioneer Potrzebie’s 1954 debut was far ahead of its time, and sunk without a trace.

Medium: brush, india ink, and a whole lotta weed.

Some Thoughts On Lettering

Peggy
March 18, 2016

A friend was trying to do some comics and having some trouble with getting the lettering to work, so I did a couple quick pages of Things I Think About When Lettering My Stuff.

I do not claim that any of these tips are The One True Way To Letter. Just that they are things that tend to make my own comics more legible. (I say this because I see a lot of lettering tips about How To Superhero Letters that take a super dogmatic tone.)

There’s a lot of stuff I left out: I did not go into using differently colored balloons, the use of different types of edges for thought balloons or for shouting/electronically transmitted stuff (or for hints about tone of voice), or why I sometimes choose centered text, sometimes left or right justified, and sometimes do paragraphs with indents. I also didn’t go into translucent word balloons – I feel that solid white balloons look super clashy over modern softly-colored art. I also left out the rant about how I feel the ALL CAPS SUPERHERO LETTERING is something best left in the past, where it was a good idea due to the terrible reproduction those things got then. Which also means I left out the digression about the weird little rule that you should never write a superhero comic about someone named Clint Flicker because of how it looks if you type it in all caps and aren’t super careful with the kerning or start having the ink bleed…

Anyway. Hope this helps someone a bit.

How To An Illustrator: Messy Brushes

Peggy
March 17, 2016

Here’s a thing I’ve been kind of wanting for a while, and finally nailed: that dotty, super-spitty-airbrush look.

Draw a black circle.
effect->brush stroke->spatter, play with the parameters until it looks good
object->expand appearance
object->image trace->make
window->image trace, play with the parameters until it looks good
object->image trace->expand
drag into brush palette, make a scatter brush

All the brushstrokes in that screenshot are done with the same green with varying opacity settings: 50% for all of them, normal/screen/multiply mode.

You probably shouldn’t try to fill in a whole image with this as things would get pretty slow to render; use it to create accents.

You could try different starting shapes and different effects – maybe a triangle that’s been put through the ocean ripple effect is just what you want. Kinda looks like a lot of messy angular brushstrokes, huh?

Or how about if I add a ‘roughen’ effect to the paths I drew, on top of using the scatter brush?

Wow, it sure looks like I made a lot of twitchy little brush dabs there, doesn’t it. Thanks for doing the work for me, Illustrator!

Edit, some time later: Or how about that oh-so-coveted spitty airbrush look? Seriously, I see people asking for that one all the time.

Caveats: You don’t want to try and draw an entire picture with these kinds of brushes. Illustrator will slow way the hell down. Lay in flat shapes with simple filled paths, then come back in and paint highlights/shadows with your Messy Brushes.

At The Tiki Bar

Peggy
March 16, 2016

Commission for Tabbiewolf and Spotweld. She wanted their characters in their basement tiki bar.

My tiki bar reference mostly consisted of typing ‘shag tiki bar’ into Google Images. People used to compare my stuff to his a lot, because we both have that 1950s animation concept art flat color kind of thing going on, but I haven’t heard that in a while. I guess his star has faded or something.

Her Joy

Peggy
March 16, 2016

A sequel to the previous picture, with my ex-with-benefits’ rubber jackal Hesire fucking succubus-Kellyn.

Afterwards, there was dinner and a movie. And lazily prepared breakfast. Succubi are much more likely to return when you treat them right.

Also included: the earlier rough I sent my XWB as a way to say “ok which one of your characters do you think would be hot to see stuffing it in succubus-Kellyn”.

After drawing that other picture, I found myself thinking about my various characters, and decided to change Kelvin’s name to Kellyn. I don’t know how many years I was drawing her as a girl but still using her old boy name; she kinda vanished for a while during my transition, with only the most sporadic appearances.

(Well, actually, she kinda vanished and reappeared as a cobra named Kalinda, who changed into a bird for a while, and now seems to be a raccoon again. Complicated things happen to fursonas sometimes.)

Illustrator, about 2:30.

the dream of going home and visiting my mother’s shade

Peggy
March 15, 2016

So there I was riding on top of a car, on my way back to the house I grew up in. I'd lost my socks on the way and my feet were chafing inside my shoes.

It was a bit of a post-apocalyptic hellscape but there were still a lot of cars on the road. Nobody was turning down onto Press, though. Everyone was staying on Chef Menteur. I hopped off the car and stood on the neutral ground, looking about. Even the fast food chains were abandoned on boarded up. Nobody wanted to live in this area any more.

But I went in. Passed a couple people walking. Got hassled by a dude on a bicycle with a lot of attitude. Who clearly was looking for someone to kill but I managed to get him to give up with the force of charisma. Hey, it was my dream, I can be incredibly charismatic if I like.

I made it to the house I grew up in. It was a giant mess. But my mom was there. Well, mostly. Her bedroom was dark and there was a vague shape on the bed, and a couple of things I was pretty sure were store-bought Get Well Soon balloons attached to various weights. But I couldn't see a damn thing in there. She was also puttering about the house, pointedly ignoring the fact that we both suspected that was her corpse in there.

Between intermittent attempts by that guy to kill me (and rollbacks when he succeeded, sometimes by really over the top methods like four airplanes firing grapples into the house and dragging it up off into the sky to uncertain doom), my mother took me up to a second floor that didn't exist in reality and showed me an old Bible. It was my grandfather's, and she wanted me to have it. I wouldn't read it, you know, I told her. And that was okay with her. She didn't care. But it meant something to her that I should take it. I dithered a bit, and accepted it.

Briefly it looked like things were getting better for the neighborhood – we thought we saw a taxi, there was a big crowd of policemen on bicycles passing through – but then it was just us and the guy who wanted to kill me, and the IR-sensing killer robot in the guise of a 3' tall grey-fur-covered rabbit, and his missile launcher. Cue a bunch of rapid rollbacks where I managed to evade this combo for about ten seconds longer each time, while trying to explain what was going on to my mother and pull her to safety too.

I woke up in the middle of that.

I'm going back to sleep. I don't feel ready to deal with the world after a dream like that.

Her Duty

Peggy
March 13, 2016

A friend drew some naked furry ladies, including a raccoon. Which made me want to draw a naked raccoon. Who was not Absinthe.

This is probably Kelvin. Either as a demon, or cosplaying a demon. It’s hard to tell; she’s been both.

Illustrator, 1:30.

I seem to have succubi on the mind lately. Probably because of spending a week throwing together a story about a witch and a succubus for the Beyond 2 anthology.

This was also interesting to do: the power is out right now, due to high winds. I sat in a nearly pitch-dark bedroom with my computer in my lap, burning through half my battery and drawing this. Hopefully the power will be restored when I wake up tomorrow; if not, I guess I’ll be going to a cafe and actually looking for a seat near a wall socket for once.

Artificial Urvogel Maintenance

Peggy
March 11, 2016

That dirty lady who draws scarily like me but is totally not me, honest, dropped by and left me this. She described it as “late night vaguely sequential doodling of kalinda as an imperious robot queen ordering her robot servant noelle to refill and pleasure her.”

Click for full-size.