Designing a magazine for print is much more a labour of love than dynamic content injected into a CMS template – each feature is specifically put together with the design working in harmony with content. Generally publishing on the web is very different – there will be a single generic design and set of templates that present any article in exactly the same way. One of the few examples I can think of that breaks this trend is alistapart, where each article is uniquely illustrated prior to publication.

I’m interested to see where the balance will lie when publishing content for a tablet. It could range from having a dedicated production team within a publication to hand craft a unique design for each issue, to basic templated content within a standard framework.

In any case there is now a very definite case for sorting out workflow and access to content so that a publisher can easily target multiple platforms.

I was working on a character sketch last night, and finished drawing one of the hands. It was quite respectable, obviously hand-like and not particularly mutated or alien. However, only once I’d finished did I notice that it was a little bit too big and in the wrong place. So… I dragged a marquee around it to select, scaled it down, then pulled it into a better position.

I guess you could look at this as cheating, and that I should practice until I can sketch it right straight off. It just seems like a great idea if you’ve drawn something you’re happy with, but slightly wrong or out of position.

Another quite cool thing is to use different layers to try out alternate versions for particular parts of a sketch. So I could create a couple of alternate hand sketches for the same character, then use layer comps to look at the different versions and decide how to proceed.

I’m still playing around with some of this, but from my experience so far it seems like sketching directly to a PC opens up quite a lot of flexibility. I’m also wondering about scanning images, fading them right down to use in the background as a template. At this stage I’m just trying to emulate some of the styles I like, so this seems like a great way to learn.

I ended up ordering the Wacom Intuos3 A3 Wide tablet, and I’m very happy. It’s actually much larger than I’d visualised, but it’s delicious to work with. I was talking recently about how sketching directly with a tablet is tricky, but more flexible. It was tricky because I was using a tiny tablet with a large widescreen monitor. I think I actually prefer sketching with the new tablet to using paper.

I went through the whole process with a picture last night, going from rough sketches, using Illustrator to produce an ink outline, then exporting to Photoshop for colouring and shading. The Illustrator inking technique I mentioned yesterday definately seems to be the best way to produce the ink outline, and the whole thing was so much less painful than trying to achieve the same with a small tablet.

I want to practice some more and produce a few pictures I’m proud of before posting any work, but it’s coming along…