Scribble - Anatomy of a Geek Doodle

In my last blog-themed post I talked about attempting some artwork using the shiny Wacom tablet (Intuos Pen & Touch S) that I got for my birthday. The idea was to make a header and some title bars to brighten up the boring empty blog template, but I got a little bit carried and ended up with a geek-based doodle that's far too big to use! It was still good practice though, and a good test run for the tablet.

I thought I'd have a go at documenting the random workings of my brain by taking pictures along the way. For the pencil drawing part these were taken with my phone, so please excuse the picture quality! For the computer part I was able to use screenshots, so these look a lot neater. Then I squished them all together in Windows Movie Maker, and voila - a slightly shoddy YouTube video!

The original drawing was made with pencil in a sketch book, and then I scanned it into the computer. In Photoshop I used the scanned image as a background, created a new layer and then traced over all the lines using the tablet. I'm not sure if this is the best way to digitize a pencil drawing, but it gave me a nice clean copy and it was easy to make amendments.

As an alternative method, I did also try duplicating the original background in 'mulitply' mode to darken it each time; this did give nice dark lines but it also amplified all the pencil smudges as well. Definitely not as tidy as I wanted, serves me right for trying to be lazy!

Here's the final version in the digital world:

The finished random article!  How many geek things can you count?

My next project should really be the blog artwork that I was supposed to be doing in the first place, although I have been wondering if I should attempt to colour this doodle in in the meantime. I've never really used colour before, but being on the computer instead of on paper gives me the chance to experiment without breaking anything. What do you think?

New blog, new opportunities for design disaster!

In deleting the old blog with its corresponding Google account, I also managed to consign to the void all the artwork I drew for the header and sidebars.  Sad times.  Actually, that's not the whole story.  A lot of the images stored on my iPad, where I used to put together my posts.  The iPad that I wiped to give to my husband approximately 24 hours before I decided I might like to restart the blog.  Further sad times.

I did, however, manage to salvage a copy of the header image, which I had shared on this Google account when telling people about the blog:

The old header.  Ick.

But I've decided I hate it.  It's huge and fussy, as well as being out of date now that I've lost the original blog name.

New start, new design.  I just need to get my brain in gear and figure out what that should look like. Clearly from my choice of title you can see that I'm not overly optimistic, but I'll have a go! Whatever it is, it may involve using this exciting new toy that I received this morning for my birthday:

Hmm, the box looks a bit like my old blog header!

My old Wacom tablet was approximately a million years old, so I'm excited to try out the little Intuos.  If there's any exciting work-in-progress I'll post it up - wish me luck!