Mike Milo’s Journal

Have a swingin’ time in the pool! Sturdy enough to even jump from!

Only from Flaviothon Industries

This past week I got to see my film Flavio a bit more complete now and one of the things that was added was the title cards I did this past summer. Well come to find that I HATE them. Soooo, I redid them a bit. What do you think?

My first attempt at something other than cartoons. I Call it Pain. For the past few months I have had terrible pain in my calf and ankles and some days its really hard to even walk.. Even better? The doctors don’t know why. Lucky me.

Anyway this is how I feel.

Here’s a new painting I did today based on a line illustration for the book Ribeye the Bullbarian and the Sands of Fate … it’s going to be for my friend Harry’s site Zaptoons Books! I am really digging this whole painting thing! I figure once I get good enough maybe I will try my hand at real paint but for now it seems pointless to pull out all the paints and brushes unless I’m gonna paint something worth seeing. I think I want to try some sort of moody impressionistic piece next. I’ll post it if it doesn’t stink! ;-)

I have a confession to make…

I am addicted to digital painting. Yes it’s true…and I am not even a good painter (yet)!

I have ArtRage to thank for it too.

I find myself looking at the world through my tired old animator eyes with some brand new artist eyes which is really cool. I used to look at the world from an animator’s perspective, checking out how long it takes for a person to walk from point A to Point B and how long it takes to pick something up, the way something overlaps or anticipates but lately
that has changed.

Now I am constantly looking at the light and how dark the shadows are… where the highlights fall and ways to make colors pop by using contrasting colors.

Very odd.

Anyway, back to Artrage. What a fantastic application! It’s only $19.95 and it’s better at true painting than Photoshop, Painter, Paint Shop Pro and just about any other grpahics app I’ve come across. the reason? Well, it’s just… simple.

For instance, there’s no cludgy pallets or windows that clutter up the screen. Instead there are elegant shelves that slide in and out when you need them. they also auto slide in when you get too close to one so it doesn’t get in your way while you paint. Pianting a stroke that looks and feels like real paint is as simple as grabbing the paint brush and sliding your hand across the screen. Amazing! No setting up brushes to behave like paint (hello Photoshop) no sifting through endless technical boxes of endless technical settings and knobs and sliders ( hello Painter). Nope, you just pick and paint! Want to mix some color? Just select the pallet knife and smear to your hearts content. Colors blend right over eachother mixing as your stroke. Don’t want that/ Simple! You make your brush an Instant Dry Brush via the elegant wheel that is invoked when you select the tool.

Tools to choose from range from a Paint Roller when you want to color mass areas, a Crayon for that waxy feel (which works great for those John K type paintings), Chalk for a bit of grain (very similar to Crayon BTW), there’s a Pencil to sketch with (which ain’t as good as SketchBook Pro’s but you can’t have everything) and you can even add glitter or tubes to your painting (although I have no clue what the heck I’d do with that), the aformentioned pallet knife (which I find invaluable when painting), an Eye Dropper tool for sampling colors and of course the invaluable Paint Brush which works great right out of the “tool box”.

You can save your own mixed swatches, and you can set a “tooth” for your paper or load your own texture to paint over as well. One of the best features is the Load Tracing Image function which allows you to set a drawing onto your canvas and paint over it, so you can see what you want when you want it. It’s easily hideable as well making in a great asset when you paint.

There are so many things I like about ArtRage that I can’t even list them all.

Suffice it to say, I am hooked and as far as my tablet Pc is concerned, Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro and Ambient Design’s ArtRage are my two most used applications. I find myself using Photoshop less and less except to export the images I am creating to post to this blog.

Download this program. Both the free and USD$20 full versions are curiously tiny installers at just over 4 MB. Get ArtRage 2.0 here.

The free program is wonderful, but the commercial version was something I wanted for the layers, PSD capabilities and extra tools and canvas options. Honestly though? The free one is pretty awesome itself!

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to paint on my tablet pc… here’s a bg I was practicing on…

Flavio was looking in the attic the other day and found a painting of his great great grandpa Giuseppe Flavio Giovanni Milano!
This portrait was painted of him the week before he left his homeland in Calabria to journey to America in 1907. Once there he worked in Brooklyn for many years as a cobbler.

Here’s a 2nd shot which is sort of a reverse view of the earlier pan down shot.