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I’ve been working on a game project in my spare time and need a good tool for vector illustration. The obvious choice is Adobe Illustrator, right? Well, I wanted to explore my options and see if I could find something cheaper. My primary criteria: Mac OS X and Wacom Intuos4 tablet support. Secondary: some sort of Adobe Flash-like animation for cut scenes would be a nice feature to have available; especially with tweening.

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I was recently going through some of my “engineering notebooks” because I’m leaving my current job. I found some of the sketches I alluded to in an earlier post and decided to scan them.

I was a little disappointed going back through the notebook because, obviously, I was a lot less bored in my meetings this past year. Some of my drawings from the year before were pretty elaborate, but they were on sheets with the meeting agenda. Since the agenda was only barely relevant for one 2 hour meeting, I would toss them in the waste basket on my way out. Once I got my new sketchbook in place, I had changed teams and was being placed on some more interesting projects. As a result, I didn’t have to attend those long team meetings anymore. Most of my notebook is the kind of stuff you would expect to find in an engineering notebook.

This year my son wants to have a Spiderman theme party. We’ve already got a Spiderman pinata, plates, cups, napkins, goodie bags, etc. My job is to create a personal birthday invitation card.

My wife talked to my son to see whether he wanted a photo of himself in his Spiderman clothes, or a drawing by me. He wanted both, of course. So, I set up all my camera gear to try to take some photos of him in his costume. As it turns out, he doesn’t seem to have the Spiderman costume that we thought he had. I could swear my sister and her fiance brought him home with one last year.

I took some photos, but they just weren’t what I was hoping for. He was kind of distracted and I was looking for a little bit more “be the Spiderman” from him. It’s probably a lot to ask of a kid going on 5. He did a good job and I got some nice photos, but it just wasn’t what I was hoping for.

So, I picked up some small greeting cards and set out to draw a greeting card cover for him. He wanted himself dressed up as Spiderman, and I wasn’t too sure how I was going to accomplish that.

I considered a few panels to tell a story of him playing, his Spider Sense tingling, him donning his costume and then webbing up a robot or something.

Once I sketched it a little, I abandoned the idea as too complex.

I decided to just draw him with everything except the mask on, with his Spider Sense tingling and some clever text about it being his birthday. I really like the chibi style of cartooning and I’ve been practicing a little here and there. My son now recognizes any wild haired brunette boy as himself. Especially if he looks like a super hero. I’m not a comic artist by any means – I never used to draw comic heroes when I was younger. But, my son thinks I am, and that’s all that matters. When I showed him the sketch, he said “cool.” What more can you ask for?

So, after sketching out an idea, I inked it and scanned it into my PC. Then I opened it up in Paint Shop Pro for some clean up.

I had to go in an clean up the random pixels and fix up some rough spots. After cleaning it up, I used the edge erosion to smooth out the lines.

Then I colored it with the fill tool and added a thought bubble. Here is the final image:

I used a custom paper size and print layout to arrange the image on the greeting cards and printed them out. They came out pretty good, I think.

I can’t remember how it happened, but I came across Tom Murphy 7′s Invincible Web Page a while ago. He has a great page of his Illustrated Notes from Computer Science. The notebook illustrations are really fun.

I think at some point, I stopped doodling in my notebooks. In college I didn’t take many notes, and consequently didn’t doodle much. At least in CS. I drew in my notebooks when I was in a breeze class that was intolerably long.

I started doodling in some of my longer, weekly meetings at work. I found them to be just like those anonymously huge intro-psychology classes: intolerable. Doodling on my handouts was a sort of out-of-body experience. A survival method for coping with my circumstances. Most of these doodles were tossed when the meetings were over.

But, I was inspired by Tom 7′s drawings. I’ve switched from lined notebooks and legalpads to a small 7×10 Canson Field Sketchbook. It’s a nice portable size, and the blank pages are great for UML diagrams, robot sketches and actual notes.