Author: Cynical Woman

Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.
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Testing out Clip Studio Paint for the iPad

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Gibbie and I go out for a run

A test comic of me and Gibbie going out for a run

Oooooh! What is this? Is it… a WEBCOMIC?!

Well, sort of. One of the biggest stumbling blocks last year to me getting the webcomic done was problems with software and hardware. I had purchased a new Microsoft Surface Pro with a larger screen, in hopes that the larger screen would make Manga Studio EX more readable, thus leading to more regular output of webcomics from me.

Alas, this was not the case. The Surface Pro really isn’t the ideal laptop for me, even with its touchscreen and high resolution. For starters, the stylus for the new Surface Pros last year was not a Wacom stylus. I have used Wacom styluses (styli?) for years, and I love them. They are dependable, easy to use, and work beautifully with a huge list of desktop software and iPad drawing apps. But for some reason, Microsoft decided to NOT use a Wacom stylus anymore and instead sold its own stylus with the Surface Pro.

What a lousy idea. First off, the Microsoft stylus runs on AAAA batteries! Do you know how hard it is to find AAAA batteries in local stores? We had to order the damn things just to get the stylus to work. That made no sense to me whatsoever. Wacom figured out a long time ago how to make styli (styluses?) that didn’t require batteries for power! My current iPad stylus, a Wacom Creative, is actually set up to charge off a USB port or Apple charger (just take out the attached cable and plug in Wacom’s charger attachment and power that sucker on up!).

The second problem I encountered was that Manga Studio DID NOT LIKE the Microsoft stylus. Rather than let me draw quickly and easily, it seemed to reject the stylus at every turn, as if the software instinctively KNEW that I was trying to pull a fast one by using a Microsoft stylus instead of a Wacom.

I struggled with it for a while, but eventually, the problem was so ridiculous that I gave up on Microsoft’s stylus and on the Surface Pro (what a waste of money). I tried searching for apps to draw webcomics on my iPad, but by that point, I’d been spoiled rotten by Manga Studio. It had layers! It had vector AND raster! It had materials and tones! It had so many effects and bells and whistles and I used all that stuff to make the webcomic!  Nothing else had this, except for a few apps that just did not play nice on my iPad. And then life started to fall apart in general and that sort of put paid to the idea of me drawing anything for a while.

Then earlier this year, I discovered that Clip Paint Studio, the original Manga Studio, was available as an app for the iPad. I decided to give it a try, but wasn’t very hopeful as I expected to encounter some of the same problems I’d had with the Surface Pro, that of having a full fledge software program on a small screen.

HOWEVER! Clip Studio Paint did look just fine on my iPad, so I plunked the money down for a subscription (yeah, it’s subscription based, which sucks, but….) and went to work on drawing new webcomics

Then I ran into the another problem that reminded me too much of the trouble I’d been having with Manga Studio on the Surface Pro. THE APP DID NOT LIKE MY WACOM STYLUS.

It liked the Apple Pencil just fine, but for some reason, it wouldn’t see the Wacom stylus as a pressure sensitive device, and so while it would let the Wacom draw, I lost all the ability to make lines thick and thin just by adding a bit of pressure (and if you draw comics, you know what a HUGE problem that can be).

Now, I have an Apple Pencil, but the damn thing is constantly running out of power. Honestly, I just can’t keep it charged. The power will last for a couple days and then FBBTZZ! Nothing. The Wacom can last for weeks on a single charge, so I never have to worry about not being able to use it, but if it wouldn’t work right in Clip Studio Paint… Well, let’s just say that contributed to another 8 or 9 months of hiatus from the webcomic.

Well, last week, I decided to open up Clip Studio Paint (I had paid for the damn thing, after all) and give it another try. I don’t know what they did, I don’t recall any update, but for whatever reason, the app now works just fine with my Wacom Creative stylus. So I decided to knock out a test drawing, see how long it took to make (still takes me longer than I’d like to draw even a single panel comic), and the result is the image you saw above waaaaaaaaaaaaay back at the beginning of this ramble.

Long story short, I may finally be able to get back to drawing webcomics the way I want to. Long story not quite as short, I may still have to suck it up from time to time and find some other way to draw the webcomic. So I’m going to research other apps that I see recommended, including Procreate and SketchClub and others, and I’ll show the results of my research here from time to time.

’Nuff said.

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Speaking of engines…

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First, I just noticed a couple of typos in my last post. To correct the worst typo… We did not have one child move from high school to middle school. It was the other way around, actually. Princess started high school last year, and she’s been having the time of her life. At the same time, Pixie started middle school. She’s doing well, but not having as much fun. A lot of that comes down to the fact that a number of her best friends no longer go to the same school. I’m hoping she’ll make new friends and start to enjoy school a bit more, but we’ll see.

Second, some days after I wrote that last post, we had some car trouble. The car had started shaking and shuddering a few times while we were driving it, but there was no obvious cause and the shop we take it to for maintenance couldn’t reproduce the problem. Since the shaking and shuddering stopped after we put new tires on the car, we thought the problem had been solved. Then last Friday, the car broke down.

While we were on the highway.

Driving into D.C.

For a weekend visit with family.

Joy.

The car didn’t just break down. The power cut out. Power steering, power breaks, everything. Yet the lights and blinkers still worked, as did the radio, so the problem obviously wasn’t the battery. Hubster managed to get us to the shoulder of the highway, and then we proceeded to call AAA, various family members, and finally Uber, all in order to get the car towed to a garage and get us to our final destination – my brother-in-law’s house.

We had a lovely weekend staying with my brother-in-law and his wife and two boys. Saw lots of sights, played games, ate a lot of good food. Meanwhile, our car sat at a garage that was closed all holiday weekend. Then on Monday, we headed to the airport. The girls and I hopped into a rental car and drove home, while Hubster stayed back in D.C. to wait for the garage to open up and diagnose what was wrong with the car.

Well, Hubster called me just a little while ago and the news ain’t great. The engine is flooded with oil. It would cost $6600 to repair. We only owe about $2000 on the car, and we just put brand new tires on it to the tune of $1000. We are currently reviewing our options, but I don’t think we’re going to bother with repairing the car.

Anyway, we had a lovely weekend otherwise, and I got to revisit the tomb of “The Queen of the Magazine,” who, as far as I can tell, still isn’t dead yet, so she’s obviously in much better shape than our car! I gotta say, I love this woman’s monument. She looks like she’s having a great life.

Tomb for the Queen of the Magazine

“The Queen of the Magazine!”

Headstone for Evelyn Davis

Evelyn Davis is still kicking, as far as I can tell from her headstone.

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Restarting my engines

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I have been away for far too long. There are a lot of reasons why – family emergencies, illness, having one child go from high school to middle school. I may go into all this more later on, but basically, life got overwhelming, and so I had to strip away everything that wasn’t essential to my day-to-day survival for a while.

I am now trying to figure out how to come back, how to restart the web and restart a lot of those other things that I had to ditch while I coped with various crises and emergencies. It’s hard. I’m not sure what to blog about anymore, or what to cartoon about, but I’m hoping that slowly but surely, I’ll figure it out.

So for the time being, I’m going to blog about whatever comes up. It might be some random art project that I’ve stolen time to work on. It might be about how I’m dealing with my own health problems, or it might actually be about something funny, like how our dog and cats do not get along (I swear, it’s like 21st venture reboot of Garfield in this house).

Eventually, I’ll find topics that I want to write about on a regular basis, but for now, I’ll just be posting the random stuff of my life. Like this little gem:

My dog Gibno!

“Baroo?!”

Yep, that’s my dog Gibno. Not sure what he’s doing, but this picture is a pretty good example of what’s going on in my life right now. Enjoy!

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Messy Monday – Cheap paint and used canvases!

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Pour painting

Is it eggs on a blue plate special, or a weather satellite image?

So, I made this last Thursday. I’ve been watching YouTube videos on pour paintings, and decided I wanted to try it for myself. My first efforts involved somewhat expensive materials – pouring medium, mid-grade acrylic paints, clean new canvas. That initial experiment turned out… okay. It was sort of blobby and not very interesting to look at. For my second attempt, I went with cheaper materials – craft paint, synthetic oil and school glue from Dollar Tree. That experiment went a bit better, but I made the mistake of picking paints that were too similar in color to really make an impression when they separated out on the canvas. I just ended up with a big muddle of green, for the most part.

Then I decided to try this one. I used an old canvas from a failed Mod Podge project, and added nothing but water to the paints. I made sure to use high contrasting colors, alternating between white, dark blue, bright yellow, and mid blue. There is a touch of gold paint in there, but it shows up more as shading of the other colors than as a bright pop of color. Beyond that, all I did was use an old heat gun to make some of the cells of color appear on the canvas.

I’ve got a couple more used canvases, including one big one that I really screwed up a while back. I bought measuring cups from the Dollar Tree to mix the paint in. I need to make a box bigger than the canvas I want to paint, so that when I pour layers of paint, I’ve got something to catch all the excess. I’ll probably line it with foil tape and lay freezer paper on top of that, in case the excess paint dries into any interesting skins. We’ll see!

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ACW Episode 307 – It’s not a horse!

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Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it full-sized!

In all honestly, I never even considered getting a horse. I’ve got no place to put on!

My apologies for the lateness of this episode. Between computer/website issues and a recent family emergency, I’ve been a bit behind getting things done. Hopefully, I’ve got everything sorted out now.

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Graphics Apps I LURVE! Pixite Assembly

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I made a cute thing in Pixite’s Assmebly app. I’m calling these guys “Shroomies,” because they’re squishie and they’re sitting on mushrooms.

Shroomies art

Aren’t they cute?!


If you haven’t used Assembly, it’s really nice and fun. The app gives you a blank art board and a library of shapes to create artwork with. You don’t draw in the traditional sense. Instead, you assemble the shapes like collage pieces to make an image. Assembly lets you set the color, transparency and outline of each shape, and you can also add shadows. You can group multiple shapes together, as well as combine or cut out shapes from each other. And, best of all, if you make a custom shape, or group of shapes (like my little Shroomie creatures above), you can save them in a custom sticker library to use again and again!

Assembly does have a couple limitations. First, it only offers flat colors, not gradients.  To get the gradient effects above, I exported my original artwork as a PNG, and then brought it into Shift, another Pixite app, to touch up the colors and add some scratchy, old-photo texture.

A second issue is the lack of layers. While you can group shapes, the app doesn’t offer layers to make organizing parts of your artwork easier. In other graphics apps, I like to use layers to separate my background, foreground, and mid ground elements, but that’s not an option in Assmbly.

Still, I love Assembly by Pixite! I’ve made some really great artwork in it, and I can always export artwork from Assembly as an SVG, if I want to bring it into Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator, or another vector graphics app. Assembly is pretty simple to use, and I can do a lot of cool things with it.

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Messy Monday – Painted Skulls and a Broken Nose

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I had an epic fail on Friday.

Pixie and I were jogging on a local trail, anways behind Princess’ cross country team. The trail in question is steep, with lots of big tree roots crossing it, along with the occasional heavy wooden beam to shore up the steeper parts. Pixie was jogging with the coach’s dog, while I jogged along behind her with Gibbie. I was doing pretty good, jogging faster than I have in a while. I was feeling pretty good.

Then I caught my foot on a tree root and slammed face first into the ground.

The good news is that I did not plant my face into a wooden beam. I hit that with my ribs, instead. The bad news is that I hit the ground HARD, and I knew that as soon as I hit, I had broken my nose.

Apparently, my crash landing was so tremendous it scared the young lady running ahead of me. After checking to see if I was okay (I was laughing as I sat up, despite my smashed nose), she ran off to get Pixie and the team coach. I told the coach I was fine and sent her off to keep track of the girls still running. Pixie stayed with me. According to her, I walked over to a nearby bench, sat down, then tumbled over ass-over-tea-kettle as Inpassed out. I don’t remember doing that, but I do remember having a very brief, pleasant dream that ended with me waking up staring at the grass and Pixie asking me if I was okay.

“Uh, yeah. I’m fine. But why is the world sideways?”

I was able to pull myself together after a few more minutes, and Pixie and I walked a mile back to our car. My nose bled the entire way. As soon as the cross country team came in, I grabbed Princess and we drove home. It took me an hour to clean up. I was covered from head to toe in dirt and dead leaves, along with blood, bruises and scrapes. But I was still laughing, so I was okay.

Later that day, Princess and Pixie asked why I had laughed through all this. I was a real mess. In addition to breaking my nose, I also tore up both knees and one elbow and I broke the big toe on my right foot. Why would I laugh when I did all that? Good question. I’m not really sure of the answer, but I hope it’s because I chose to laugh instead of cry. Yes, it all hurt like hell, but I think crying or even just complaining would have made it much worse. Laughing as soon as I got up seemed to make it feel better. And I think I chose to laugh because I knew that, but I knocked myself so silly, I can’t be sure I actually made that choice.

In any event, I have a couple of photos of the skulls I’ve been painting. I’ve gotten farther along, adding dots of white paint to make patterns. Over the white, I’m adding a bit of metallic paint, and then I plan to add some jewel-tone paints on top of that. What do you think?

Blue skull

I tried making the dots with a paint brush, but found a stylus works better.

Pink skull

This one is my favorite so far!

Yellow skull

This one’s a bit messy, but I’ve gotten farther along with it.

 

And there you have it! This week’s mess. Yay!

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The Black Thumb Rides Again

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If there were a world court of crimes against gardening, I would be tried and convicted of murder.

I have a perpetual black thumb. If there is a way to kill a plant, I will find it. Even silk florals have died at my hands. But every year, I still keep trying to establish a garden.

This year, I’m having a bit of success, though not the success I was expecting. The tomato plants I started indoors sprouted up beautifully at first then died before I could get them into the ground outside. The herb seeds I buried in pots never even tried to grow, so I’ve got four empty pots sitting out in the yard right now. I don’t know why I keep watering them.

But I have had some successes. First, the melon and pumpkin seeds I started have really taken off. Crazy person that I am, I’m growing these in a couple of 4×4 foot plots. I know, that’s not a lot of room for melons and pumpkins, but careful research has led me to believe that I can grow these vining plants on a TRELLIS! So, we’re trying that…

Trellises

My crazy trellised garden!

As you can see, I’ve already set up slings for a couple of the melons that have started growing. I’m going to have to get more cheese cloth, and probably something stronger than that, as these babies grow, but right now things look promising.

Melons!

Melons in slings! When they get bigger, I’ll train them to walk on the high wire!

The pumpkins will be put in slings too. The type of pumpkin I’m growing is supposed to turn out blue when they’re full grown, so I’m looking forward to having pumpkins that match my hair!

Pumpkin!

One day, this will be a lovely blue pumpkin!

Other than that, I’ve had some success with radishes and turnips (making me feel like I’m participating in a real-life version of Rune Factory). And the zucchini has finally started growing too. Now if I can just keep up with harvesting and cooking what I grow, things will be great!

Zucchini

I have grown a loverly zucchini!

And if it all goes south… well, I need a place to set up a graveyard in October anyway. What better than a plot of land filled with the remains of all my latest victims?