Thoughtful

Some new artwork!

...At least I feel like she's being thoughtful.

And, a thought for you: which do you like better red or blue?

I asked on social media (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) and overwhelmingly folks liked blue better -- and so do I! That's why her "uniform" is blue after all.

I like blue because it's much more pleasing to the eye (at least my eye).

One person even said they thought the blue contrasted better with her skin tone and hair color, and that's a really good reason -- otherwise there's a lot of red in the image.

But, hey I'm open to other color combinations too! What are your favorite colors?

Process Video

You can watch the entire creation process for this piece here. I started with a pose I found on Instagram and roughed it out.

 

All of the work was done using my iPad Pro. I've really come to enjoy using that for all my workflow. Years ago I did everything on my Surface Pro 3, but I like the Apple Pencil better -- when used with a matte screen protector on my iPad.

I do all of the roughs, inking, and coloring for these pieces of artwork and the new Magical Girl Kamiko comic pages there and then export to Google Drive to bring them onto my Surface Pro 3 to post. I don't do any post-processing here.

Do it on the iPad.

One and done!

Kdenlive Non-Linear Video Editor

I did use the Surface Pro 3 to create the timelapse video using free software called Kdenlive. It's a free non-linear video editor. It allows you to import media and make title sequences and do some other simple video effects. Everything you see in the video above I did in Kdenlive.

There's still much more I can do with video editing. I didn't really go through any tutorials, this is all done with poking at the tool and using what I know and expect from non-linear video editors.

I was using Blender 2.8+ before for video editing, but honestly it became a huge hassle doing effects in Blender -- and I mean basic things. Another issue was exporting the video took a long time. Kdenlive is able to produce a 1080p video in maybe ten minutes, or so. Blender would take 30-60 minutes.

Overall, it's free and gets the job done, what more can you ask for in a tool? I'd like to see if I could use a combination of Blender and Kdenlive to push what I can do in this space. Motion graphics? It would be nice to have an intro screen for the drawing timelapse videos. Maybe I should do voice overs? I don't know, what would you want to see?

The audio for the music comes from Audio Library which produces free Creative Commons music for Youtube. I honestly grabbed the first thing I heard, otherwise I could spend forever picking audio.