The Layla-Mae & Phoenix sticker sheets are ready to print! I’m waiting on the client (my cousin) to let me know how many of each he wants. Then I’ll print them out on adhesive vinyl sheets, cut them and mail them out. While I’ve been waiting I pulled out the spare Raspberry Pi, attached to a 7” touchscreen, that I had laying around. I installed the latest OS and managed to get Disney+ to run on it, but not very well. I also tried installing Retropie, to play old school video games, but had no luck getting that to work. I’m on the lookout for something cool to with my second Pi computer but everything is either lame or above my skill level.

Before printing this out I brought the artwork into Illustrator and went through every eye, mouth & nose to clean them up. I also a brought in the vectorized Layla-Mae, instead of the rasterized graphic I'd been using in it's place, so now the name looks way sharper. Tomorrow I'll print smaller versions to see how they look.

I recorded myself doing a quick drawing using a GoPro Hero 3+ that I'm borrowing from a friend. I'm still waiting on parts to mount my DSLR overhead so I figured I'd test a different camera while I wait. The GoPro has three Fields of View and I used Narrow in this video because I didn't want to distort the image. The downfall is that I can't fit the entire page on the screen. After recording myself draw I edited the video in iMovie to speed it up (from 10 minutes to 30 seconds) and added some transitions, titles, & stock music.

I spent most of the day fixing images I created in Adobe Fresco, on my iPad, then converted to printable formats on my computer. First were these 6 drawings of mine. My brother is going to get them printed and framed. I think they were in RGB format on the iPad then became dull when I converted them to CMYK on the laptop. It took me hours to figure out the best way to select the individual colors within the images, based on how I drew it, and finding approximate color matches. The next problem was when I exported a PDF from Illustrator that I originally drew in Fresco. In the PDF I there were thin lines around every brush stroke that wasn't showing up anywhere else before. My buddy Adam needed the artwork I made for his band's album, "Elysian," minus a the background, to put it on merch. He requested a PDF and I thought it was going to be as simple as one-click. Now I'm reading a 31 page guide trying to understand transparencies because I think that's what's causing the issue. I sent Adam some hi-res JPGs, hoping that they'll work for him, until I figure out how to fix this. I thought computers were supposed to make things easier for us.

I snapped pics of the ceramic skull I'm painting for the upcoming "31 Skulls" art show and I'm digitally coloring in the cells before I go and actually paint it. I'm using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to quickly draw and fill the cells. My goal is to have all the colors balanced out and equally distributed around the skull.

It's been a pretty busy week at home so far. Not so much much with art but with other projects. Tonight I rearranged & saved my workspace on Adobe Illustrator to match designer Aaron Draplin's workspace, as shown on one of his Skillshare videos. His course, "Design Like Draplin: 21 Tips for speedingUp Your Design Workflow," is what motivated to buy a larger external monitor. I've been using my 15" Macbook for years and never realized how cramped and cluttered my workspace was till I watched his course. 

Today I bought a one-year subscription to Skillshare Premium. Skillshare.com is website with a bunch of online courses on all a bunch of different subjects. I heard about it when one of my favorite graphic designers, Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co., shared on his Instagram (@draplin) that he released a new course. He's taught 6 of them. Tonight I watched his 2-hour course on improving your Adobe Illustrator workflow and it alone is worth the $59 I paid for the whole year.

It's been a few weeks since I'd drawn on the iPad so today I picked it up and did a few "quick" doodles. The timelapse videos were exported from Adobe Fresco and sped up in iMovie.

I finally got around to filling in the background. Before inking the piece I did a mock-up in Photoshop, printed it out, and made a few edits. When I started I didn't take into account the black space between shapes so some areas barely have any background showing through. My solution was to shave some shapes down to allow more black to come through. I did everything on the photocopy before transferring them to the piece. I also tested Sharpies vs Copic markers on the same photocopy to see which black is blacker. The Copic was just a tiny bit darker so I'm been using that to fill in the background. 

I went for another walk today at Lake Cunningham park. The plan was to run but I woke up still sore from running a couple days ago. Instead of running I did another brisk walk. 2 laps along the road that goes around the inside of the park. I fired up the Map My Run app for the first time at Lake Cunningham and was surprised that each lap is 2 miles long. Maybe tomorrow I'll be good enough for a run.

You know, that mouse guy...

I had the idea for this last year. I drew it out in Adobe Draw but didn't like the way it came out so left it alone and forgot about it. I still had the reference pic on my iPad so I gave it another go tonight and was much happier with the result this time around. 

Another digital doodle done on Adobe Fresco. I'm still getting a hang of it but liking this app a lot better than Adobe Illustrator Draw.

I was playing with the different brushes in Adobe Fresco for the iPad. It lets you draw/paint with vector and bitmap brushes. It also has Live Brushes that work like watercolors and oil paints. I messed around with those a little but everything I made looked like shit. I liked how the halftone brush looked so I used it as my background for this pink demon dood.

The updated Coronavirus guidelines & rulings are requiring gyms to close for a few weeks. Lately I've been going 3 times a week to use the treadmill. Luckily I can go run & walk outside, as long as it's not raining. Here's the time lapse from the Adobe Fresco app, with some music, of the drawing I inked last night. 

I digitally inked this sucker tonight. I used Adobe Fresco on the iPad, which is a replacement for Adobe Illustrator Draw. I've been using Draw for a couple years. It's what I used to draw the vector based graphics for my t-shirts. Fresco is taking a little getting used to but it seems to be a much better app than Draw.

I didn't do a good of tracking business related mileage last year. I downloaded a mileage tracker on my phone last year and never really checked it till this weekend. There are probably thousands of trips logged on the app and it just gives me the addresses at every stop. I have to click each address and zoom in to figure out the locations. I reviewed a bunch of trips today from 2019 and figured it would take me days to go thru all of them so I went and did all of 2020. I want to be better about logging mileage going forward so I'm gonna try and review my trips everyday before bed. Wish me luck. 

I was asked to submit an image and a 30 word description for my upcoming art show at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library for a newsletter going out to San Jose State students, faculty & staff. I hate writing about myself so I started with the image. It began as a pencil & paper sketch then brought in a photo of the library into Adobe Illustrator and started playing around. It's not perfect but I'm liking where it's going. I might make a few tweaks before submitting it and probably do more by show time. Now to go write a description...

I finished building my dancing robot in After Effects. I need to figure out keep it from getting blurry after I export the video. Not bad for my second animation tho :)

My friend Amanda emailed me yesterday and asked if I'd be interested in designing a graphic for an award her organization will be presenting in a couple weeks. This morning we discussed details over the phone. I put together a couple designs today and will work on at least one more to submit for consideration. More on that later. I also finished designing my robot in Illustrator. Tomorrow I'll import it into After Effects to animate. 

I was dragging ass all day. The most productive thing I did was buy groceries. The next most productive thing was go over some basic tutorials in After Effects. The tutorial, on object parenting, had all the resources and instructions was within the app. When I was done I started drawing objects in Illustrator to make my own animation. I'll try and knock it out tomorrow.

I fired up After Effects tonight after watching some tutorials and made this little turd. It looked all crispy & clean before I exported it. Apparently there's a lot I gotta learn.

I watched a few video tutorials today on how to use After Effects and InDesign. I want to create animations with After Effects for fun and to promote my brand online. InDesign is perfect for putting together zines or books, which I want to do with my Inktober drawings. Tomorrow I'll fire up After Effects and try to create something cool. I'll get to InDesign later. The Inktober zine/book project is on hold till I get the proper gear to take good photos of my drawings. 

I've been subscribing to Adobe Illustrator for a while. It cost about $21 per month. Last week I got an email from Adobe to upgrade to All-Apps for $30/mo. I think regular is $53/mo. I was already thinking of adding Photoshop, which is $10/mo, so I hopped on this deal. Today I downloaded Photoshop as well as Indesign and After Effects. I'm familiar with Photoshop but I've never used the other two. Indesign is for creating layouts, which might come in handy, and After Effects is for creating animations, which looks like it could be lots of fun. I became interested in After Effects after watching videos created by this guy named Cyriak on Youtube. I want to learn to make animations like these: