I’m leavin’ on a Jet Plane…

Off to smoggy Los Angeles. I’ll have a report from the trip on Monday…

In the meantime, though the miracle of post-dated blog technology, there will be a new installment of the ever popular Sunday Mailbag tomorrow.

This month I intend to do a full color tutorial on digitally coloring an illustration in PhotoShop. I’ve had good intentions to do a more thorough one for some time now, but I’ve come to some stark realizations over the months since I did the “mini coloring tutorial“. The first was that I cannot do a tutorial using an actual freelance job. This is because by the time I get to the color stage (i.e. the LAST stage) I am invariably under the gun with respect to a deadline and don’t have the time to devote to meticulously breaking down the process. Therefore I need to do a personal or promo piece for the tutorial. I’ve got one in mind. The second realization was that it will involve the use of something more than words and stages of pictures to really demonstrate the process. Before the infamous Hard Drive Crash of ’06, I was experimenting with a program that would record screen actions as movies that I could upload to YouTube or Google Video and use as a suppliment to the tutorial. Unfortunately that program was PC only, and I just got one that does a similar function for the Mac. If all goes well, there will be some video of the process with a voiceover that will be incorporated into the tutorial. I haven’t figured out how to work that yet, so don’t take that possibility as a promise.

I also intend to start a series of blog posts about my theories and views of how to draw caricatures in December, which after some thought and prodding by readers I believe will only help me get the book on track and done.

I will also blog incessantly about nothing as often as the urge takes me.