No ripped music library, no picture library, no ability to swap content with your PC or iPod etc. only 160Gb of HDD space which will allow you only 20-30 hours of HD content and apparently they will be releasing it without any capability to transfer to external hard drive short of a PAID firmware update. To add insult to injury, can you believe they will actually display advertisements while you fast forward? ...see MyEPG for more detailsBut the real bitter pill to swallow is the Channel Seven TiVO cartel's attempt to make it illegal to use a published TV guide to information to record Free to Air television shows (other than using their device); and yes, the current copyright conditions are easily interpreted to include using the newspaper for the purpose of programming your VCR! Hang on aren't the rights to broadcasts licensed from us, the public (ok its through government licences, no TV stations or hardware manufacturers owns the broadcast space, it is not their property, and stange how there is no mention of legality of recording free to air broadcast, just that you are infrigining copyright if use a guide to know when to do the recording)
for Illustration Fridays topic Momentum
This is the rework of a very early sketch of alvin, using photo of clouds to enhance the idea of falling. It is also my first blog post using window's live writer
As I was planning this cartoon, I realised there was an opportunity to exploit the collage part of my technique and use a photo of actual cards to help out in the development of this joke, but I also wanted to add "meet the people" style arms and legs to keep the cartoon feel. So these were sketched up seperately, scanned in and it was all pasted together in corel draw.
This cartoon marks a slight change of software (paint.net & corel draw) and a new format that will fit perfectly onto your PSP (play station portable)
2) Next I get out my meet the people folder, which is one of those commercial spiral bound folders with lots of clear plastic sleeves, into which I have, over time, inserted lots of cut outs of alvin & lila's body shapes and other common things I might use in a cartoon illustration. Often I have to draw a new item specific to the cartoon, like the toilet, in this case
3) Next I assemble the cartoon. Using cut outs means I can play around with position and adjust gestures and postures of the main characters. This can make all the of difference between boring (the way you first assemble or draw things) and something interesting and dynamic, which may be only the slightest elongation of stretching of change of angle, that gets the composition to gel. I them place this on my scanner bed [The photo shows things face up when of course they will be face down, but that would be boring to photograph]. 
4. I use corel trace and import the image directly from my scanner using the acquire settings. I convert the bitmap to Black & White and then do Perform Trace By Outline, which generated the shapes as line work for corel draw
5) In corel draw I add colour and text. I also now have a small library of template for such things as standard layout and speech bubbles and also text annotation already in the colours and fonts I want to use. These helps me maintain a stylistic commonality without having to worry about it and save time.
