The Studio In Your Head

As some of you may have noticed, over the last few months, I’ve been nonstop obsessed about the iPad Pro. I’ve made several videos on this.

“Obsessed” is such a good word for it. So much of my mind space has been dedicated to unpicking all of its advantages and disadvantages in the same way I would, say, a dip pen or walnut ink. I think it’s natural for artists to feel this way, as art tools often feel like superpowers. Except instead of this one giving you super-strength or invisibility or the ability to do useless somersaults, art tools can give you smooth gradients or steady lines or chunky textures, the ability to animate or letter like the pros.

And the iPad Pro has really come super far since its inception a decade ago as a “large iPhone”—now, paired with the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, it’s turning into what is, for me, the ideal mobile comics-makings studio.

Anyway, I go into it in more detail in the video below:

Spoilers: after much hullabaloo, I ended up returning the M1 iPad Pro. Why did I do that, after so much excitement? Well, because I can’t afford it. Or, more properly: given my limited financial resources, I don’t think it’s worth the money. And that came down to the way the iPad manages RAM, or rather limits it, so that programs that SHOULD be able to use 16 gigabytes are hampered by the operating system.

After publishing this video review, I thought the story was over, and I would merrily traipse into the sunset with my less-RAMmed but just-as-capable 2018 iPad. But then! Last night! I noticed 9to5mac published this article based on the latest developer beta of iPadOS 15:

“A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS,” writes 9to5mac.

“A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS,” writes 9to5mac.

What does this mean? Well, no doubt it means that, come the big September update, apps like Procreate and Clip Studio will be updating to take advantage of all that extra RAM and we’ll finally get all those sweet, sweet layers the iPad provides. It also means my video isn’t going to age very well. I’ll probably have to make a follow-up video correcting my assessment if things progress accordingly.

My hope is that when iPadOS updates this September, all the art apps I use follow suit. And THEN maybe I’ll think about buying the latest iPad Pro with 16GB RAM. Times like these, I am reminded of how patience is a virtue I often lack.

Anyway, while waiting for developers to work their magic, I decided to test out Clip Studio on the iPad today. I already own and like it on the PC but the iPad version is subscription-based, which has turned me off until now. My friend Luciano Vecchio does comics for Marvel using this program on the iPad, so I should have been testing it earlier, seeing as he gets such beautiful results out of it. Here’s my first doodle from this morning:

It’s been really promising. I’ve switched on the 3-month free trial and I’ll be putting it through its paces for an upcoming comic I’m working on. I still have to give it a project name. Maybe Project Inside? I dunno.

Wow, this blog post really turned into a bit of a babble today, huh? I’m not sure why I called it “The Studio In Your Head.” I guess it’s something to do with how we want our tools to align with how we envision ourselves using them? Get the real-world studio to match up with the one in your imagination; that kind of thing.

I hope you’re all having a good week. July is almost here, and we’re well into the heart of summer. Talk soon. 💭

Fragments in the Void

Today’s bus sketch.

Today’s bus sketch.

Okay, so I’m just starting a quick sentence to note down that I don’t feel like I have anything to write about today.

My mind keeps coming back to that quote by Austin Kleon, about how you don’t write daily to say things that you already have to to say—instead, you’re writing to figure out your thoughts and parse them out in words. (Note to self: find the actual wording of this quote for later.)

I think I get the principle of it, but its practice and execution feels much easier said than done. Obviously, as a human being, I have no shortage of thoughts, but they’re mostly disjointed, scattered fragments that often don’t cohere into anything that resembles all the lovely writing I read on a daily basis.

This is compounded by the info-dense world we live in, where an ocean of notifications, messages and ideas threaten to drown us in information. So many of my day-to-day musings never resolve into anything substantial. Incomplete, they float off into the void, conclusions aborted, as my attention divides across manifold distractions.

I suspect this is the same for everyone. Good writers just have the clarity of purpose, and probably a good measure of patience, to organize their thoughts on paper.

That’s where the craft of it comes in, I guess. Find a nugget of a fragment of a whisper of a thread, and braid it together with some offhand knowledge. Splice in some memories and wrap it up in language to produce a readable string of sentences. I dream of doing this without struggle, letting the words flow out of me the way I imagine it does for the great writers of our species. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at it, like Murakami on a marathon, focused on the journey rather than the destination, each word a step that takes you further toward that horizon.

Hey look: a few paragraphs just materialized. Not bad for having nothing to write about. More tomorrow.

NoBoy and the Inside Ocean of Why

The original first page of this comic, 5.5 x 8.5”, graphite on copy paper.

The original “Page 1” of this comic, 5.5 x 8.5”, graphite on copy paper.

When making comics, sometimes it pays to just wing it.

I drew this little 5-pager out on cheap copy paper with no plan—just following my nose panel by panel until it got to the end. It’s really hard to articulate the process, because a lot of it was about just going by feel, like wandering through a new city or inventing a new song.

But every beat in this story was informed by the last one, and I let my amusement guide me as I attempted to escalate the ridiculousness of this little tale. Much of it was informed by the pandemic trash fire that was 2020, with every day seemingly crazier than the last. The ending kind of alludes to the cyclical nature of time last year. I still find myself wondering what day of the week it is (the answer was always “Blursday.”)

Once I had the five sketched-out pages, I redrew them in proper print-ready size using Procreate on the iPad, tweaking a few things along the way (like the title, obviously.) Scroll down to read the entire story. I hope you like it!

On “The Memex Method”

Sketch for a comic I may never make.

Sketch for a comic I may never make.

I’ve been a reader of Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic for about a year now. It’s one of my favorite blogs, covering a myriad of topics that range from DRM on refrigerators to Qanon Gamification and Vaccine Passports. I like to think of it as a daily dive into how strangely science-fiction our present day society has become.

Doctorow writes thoroughly and thoughtfully about every topic he tackles and he’s quite generous with links. Oftentimes a single blog post turns into an inter-textual reading extravaganza for me, akin to Wikipedia-surfing. I’m quite amazed at how he manages to do this daily (on top of all his other commitments—he’s published several books and graphic novels.) I’ve often wondered how it’s even possible.

Well, I just discovered an article called “The Memex Method” (looks like it was published just last week) where Doctorow lays out the hows and whys of his blogging habit and discusses its various advantages.

“Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys…

Like those family trip-logs, a web-log serves as more than an aide-memoire, a record that can be consulted at a later date. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

The other bit that struck me was how he likened it to Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” thought experiment (from the 1945 article, “As We May Think”) which outlines “a machine that serves to organize its user’s thoughts and semi-automatically bring related ideas together to help the user synthesize disparate insights and facts into new, larger works.”

I probably shouldn’t quote so much from the article but it was such an inspiring read that I want to note it down for future reference. You can read the rest of it HERE.

I really like the philosophy behind this, where the act of blogging has value in and of itself, rather than as a stepping stone to “building a brand” or “finding an audience.” I don’t know. I like the thought of having more readers but chasing them down is like putting the cart before the horse, you know? I started this blog six months ago as a reaction to all that social media toxicity, and I’m rather enjoying the calm of having a public notebook that doesn’t have all those built-in infinity pool hooks. I often have a fog in my brain and I find that writing for the sake of writing clears it out.

Warren Ellis described blogging as “leaving traces”—just putting stuff out there as a side-effect of engaging with ideas. Publishing as a way of thinking out loud. I’m still quite scattered in this regard, bouncing between YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, but as I move forward I’m hoping I’ll find my groove.

Anyway, this is all feeding into my Monday morning as I launch into some aggressive planning for the next few months, figuring out how to parse my next big project and really putting some thought into where all my time and attention should be going. Wishing you all a lovely week. See you on the next trace.