I don't make a habit of entering competitions but I had to enter this one.
Any geek worth his/her RAM has heard the name Kingston, the maker of high quality RAM modules.
They've organised a competition to select their next advertisement mascot.
I simply couldn't resist so I've entered my submission, you can find it here: [link]
Check it out and if you want, you can vote for it too.

I get bored. That's not to say I am lazily sitting around staring at the clouds wishing that there was some excitement in my life. No, not that kind of boredom.
What I am talking about is the kind of boredom you get by using the same software over and over again.
I've been using Photoshop in it's various incarnations for over 10 years now and frankly it bores me. I want an alternative.
Search the internet and you will see dozens of "alternatives", both open source and commercial. I've tried a few of them to see if they could cure me of my "bored-with-Photoshop blues".

I can only judge a program's usefulness with regards to webcomics. Digital photography and digital painting are subjects which I don't know much about so I can't measure these programs efficiency towards those purposes.
Also, I can only judge on the way I make webcomics myself. There are millions of styles and techniques so my views towards these applications are purely personal ones.

First of all I tried the Gimp and frankly, apart from an interface created by blindfolded, rather dull 10 year old with a distinct lack of talent at making interfaces, it's a pain to use. I've noticed that it does not allow you turn off anti-aliasing and it does not have a polygonal lasso, instead it has a path selection tool which adds a few extra unnecessary steps and completely kills the work flow. It seems that to do even the simplest task like de-selecting an area, you have to find your way through menus.
Automation is possible and, I would say, more powerful than Photoshop, but it is done with Script-fu, and as the name suggests, it's done with scripting. Unless you know how to program in Scheme, it's of no use to you (and further proof that the Gimp is not made for artists, but for Linux geeks that would like to make their own forum avatars).
Even though it's free, I can only see the Gimp being OK for people who just want to resize pictures and write captions for LOLCATS.com, webcomic artists should look elsewhere unless seriously strapped for cash.
It must be noted that I have yet to see a good, professional looking image created using Gimp, I can only find pictures that people took of themselves then passed through a filter so it looks "trippy". I've searched the internet to no avail but if anyone can point me towards a professional looking image created entirely on Gimp, I would be very thankful.

Paint.net is nice mainly because it's free. It's severely limited on tools but what it has it's very good! Simple and speedy operations and despite not having a lasso tool, the freehand selection tool is rather spiffy and the pen tool is nice and easy to use.
If you're not very ambitious and have no cash, this might be a good option.

Open Canvas is another one. It feels cheap, crashes a bit and runs rather slow, but it has a fantastic selection of brushes, the interface is easy to understand and the set of tools are rather good for webcomic artists. Once again though, the selection tools do not allow you to turn off anti-aliasing but for the low price you pay (about 6000 yen or $65 AUD) you get a great package which is easy to use and gives you plenty of power... even if you can't turn off the horrible antialiasing. Excellent for those on low budgets.

Corel Photopaint 12 is a fully fledged commercial application and frankly, the only real alternative to Photoshop I've seen. The set of tools are fantastic! Anti-aliasing is not an issue here and they even provide you with a powerful and easy to use vector pen tool.
Layers are well handled and filters are plenty, however, performance is a problem as it has to think a lot harder about things compared to Photoshop and the number of brushes are truly underwhelming (although you can easily configure them to you taste).
Another sore point is the lack of a navigation window that allows you to move through the picture when doing detailed work.
Priced at $200 AUD, it's easy to forgive it's few faults when you consider that Photoshop costs about $800!


If you already have Photoshop, there's no upgrade path from there and you'll be wise to stick with it. On the other hand, if you cannot afford Photoshop's ludicrous price tag, Corel Photopaint and Opencanvas are good options.
If you have no money at all though, you are severely restricted. There's really not much that will allow you to produce outstanding results without sacrificing a goat and chanting the New Kids On The Block lyrics backwards.

Okay... Some of you might have noticed that I tend to talk a lot about things and never do much about them... ever. So, imagine my surprise when I realised that I've just started a new comic.
The address is here [link], the same as before.

Lowroad was a marketing effort, designed to target a very specific demographic... I asked readers what they wanted and I gave them just that. This time it's gonna be a bit different. I'm going to draw something which, for me, will just be fun. I hope that readers will appreciate the change in humour and style of this new comic compared to the old one. If they don't, that's okay as well.

Okay, I haven't been doing much art lately.
So what has been keeping me busy during the festive season apart from the usual festive preoccupations?
A new comic. Yep, I'm finally putting pencil to paper and getting on to it.
I've just finished the script and page layout and now all I have to do is pencil it, ink it and colour it... sigh...

Okay, Let's talk geek.

I spent last Saturday playing around with Microsoft's latest OS, Vista.
Now, I'm not the kind of person who feels loyalty towards any brand (Microsoft and Apple could all go to hell for all I care if Linux was able to do all I wanted...) but I gotta say things the way I see them.

Vista was either written written by a group of monkeys pounding away at the keyboard or as an April fool's joke. There is NO WAY on Earth that Microsoft can seriously expect people to pay $674.00 (premium edition) for something that makes my little cousin's kindergarten pictures seem like masterpieces of craftsmanship and skill.

Okay, maybe I'm being harsh. First impressions were good... well, after the 2 hours of updating the damn thing with patches that is (downloading took like 5 minutes, it was the actual installation that took hours). After the patching though, I was impressed. The system was responsive and aero is kinda pretty (if you got a DX9 card and 2Gb of RAM)... the navigation takes a bit of getting used to but it works surprisingly well... so well in fact that at that moment I was almost sold!

Then I met the UAC. Microsoft's equivalent to stopping car accidents by making cars with no steering wheels or engines so you cannot drive them. The dam thing bugs you about absolutely everything! Seriously, how did anyone at Microsoft thought "Yeah, that works good!". It's supposed to be a security feature.. I guess it keeps you computer safe from viruses and adware by making you so irritated that you end up throwing the computer out the window... there, no more virus problems...
I promptly turned it off.

Installation of drivers went smoothly with no surprises there.

With that out of the way I started installing programs... Why does COD4 take 1 hour to install? Wait... EVERYTHING takes ages to install! I turned off the Windows Search service which seems to flog the HDD like buggery and tried again... no change...
Oh well, maybe the programs will run OK... and they did! Kinda. Games where slightly slower than the usual but not much. Ok, things were not perfect but they weren't too bad either.

Then I tried Photoshop CS3 (Which is the only one that will work on Vista)
I remember the first time I used Photoshop... it was Windows 95 on a 100Mhz Pentium 1 processor with 64Mb memory... That was like driving a Bugatti Veyron compared to Vista. Everything you did had a 2 second delay to it. Clicking on tools, clicking on menus... EVERYTHING!

Sure, not everything is MS fault (a lot is also bad support from third parties) but the plain fact is that Vista is still quite useless and annoying (specially compare to XP). There is no way I'm paying the premium price for the 'Wow- what a piece of crap' experience.

Anyway I'm soooooooooooooooo sticking to my copy of XP for years to come (no, I'm not getting a Mac... not unless they stop putting those $10 bargain basement video cards on them and you can properly upgrade the damn things... and yes, I know you can upgrade Mac Pros but I'm not selling a kidney to buy one)