Who are you, and what do you do?
I am an illustrator, sometime cartoonist, sometime humorist, or some combination of the three. Maybe an illustrationist? What I do is illustrations, cartoons and the occasional humor bit. Very convenient the way who I am and what I do sync up like that.
When not gainfully employed I play around with terrycolon.com which I do mainly for my own amusement and to keep the brain gears from rusting in my down time. Anyway, they say practice makes perfect. Though if you practice wrong then I suppose you'll do things perfectly wrong.
Considering the follow-up questions below, we can pretty much forget about the humorist claim in my bio because there's nothing in hardware or software that helps me with humor. At least, I haven't found a "make funny" function on my computer.
The above who-I-am and what-I-do is my public persona. My private life, on the other hand, I choose to keep to myself. That's why it's called private.
What hardware do you use?
I use an old G4 for scanning and a new Mac Whatever-it-is for everything else. I use two computers because, well, I'm cheap. Or thrifty, as my Scottish grandma would have said. When I got the new machine I simply didn't want to buy a new scanner or Photoshop upgrade since what I had worked fine on the creaky G4.
I can't tell you much about my hardware because I'm blissfully oblivious about it. My brother, who's the propellerhead in the family, helped me pick it out. All I know is it's one of these new-fangled Macs with an operating system named after a big cat of some sort. (Puma, ocelot, cerval? I dunno.) Beyond that, as far as I can tell computer coding is some kind of key-stroked, modern spell casting. Nerd voodoo.
And what software?
Here's my working process:
- Sketches with pencil and marker on tracing paper.
- Finished drawings in marker on tracing paper.
- Line art scanned into Adobe Photoshop at 300dpi. Scans cleaned up where needed.
- Transfer file between computers with Verbatim memory stick sneakernet.
- Bitmap art imported into Adobe Illustrator and converted to vector art.
- Vector images assembled, edited and colored in Illustrator.
It's easy as one-two-three, even though it's actually six steps in case you didn't pay close attention. Yeah, the step 4 sneakernet is cheesy. Did anything above make you think I'd know how to network my computers?
I build terrycolon.com with BBEdit. Not that I know it's better than anything else, but that's what they used for Suck.com and so I just went with it. I upload to the web with Filezilla because I got it free. Like I said, thrifty.
What would be your dream setup?
I don't dream of setups. Though I sometimes dream I'm at the computer doing illustrations. Which is really annoying because I never save the work and don't get paid for it.