On the election results

helping out on ...Many Mistresses

Alvin doesn't mind helping illustrate a point for Norm's Photo Blog.

The great last cookie mystery

Alvin decides to keep secret the mystery of the last cookie.

IF :: Bounce

This is a bit of self-indulgent self reference back to how alvin first came about (as a simple cartoon idea for cut-out and paste composition.)

For Illustration friday's topic bounce

IF :: Lost

Alvin fears he has lost his ipad forever, as Lila descends into shades of grey.

For Illustration friday's topic lost

IF :: All his own space

Alvin like his own space.
For Illustration Friday's topic space

Did the earth move for you?

Do you have your own story to tell?

Alvin raises his short black for local boy@mattperger who just won the 2012 world brewers cup. Well done mate.
from twitter

Life's Little Challenges

IF :: Shiny New Things

Alvin gets a chance to get his hands on the latest shiny new iThing. He is just not certain what it is and how it works.

For Illustration Friday's Topic shiny

IF :: you are on hold

Lila discovers it is not possible to hurry the on hold message, no matter how important her call is to them!

For Illustration Friday's topic hurry

The Unexpected

It may not be wise to always rely on the GPS in your smart phone.

IF :: You are fading

For Illustration Friday's Topic faded

Nothing tastes as good as thin.

Lil thinking to herself,"I sure hope this isn't a skinny mirror"

We have been away, a few computer gliches meant the old version of corel draw wouldn't run on vista or windows 7. So we have had an upgrade, a new computer home and we are now being created on corel's graphics suite X6. Its all much higher resolution and much much faster. Hopefully that will been less time to do the routine production things and more time to create!

Happiness :: Melbourne Cup

Happiness is getting a Bart Cummings Horse in the Melbourne Cup Sweep

IF :: Scary

For Illustration Fridays topic scary
 

Well this looks different

Alvin has been a little bored, make that a lot bored, by the the same old format for this blog. Maybe that's why he hasn't appeared much lately. Anyway he has asked to change over to the dynamic template. This should give you, the reader, the opportunity to select the format that you like reading or browsing the best. The different format options are up on the orange bar just below the header. I have selected the magazine format as the default but you are free to choose your own preferred view. Give then a good work out and I'd love to get your opinion, so please leave comments.
By the way, the view from mobile phones is not dynamic but has been simplified to save bandwidth.

New methods on a rainy afternoon

It has been a while since I have posted a cartoon, primarily because I’m travelling. So I don,t have my scanner or access to the myriad things in my normal software in my corel draw and paint tool kit. It was rainy today so I decided to investigate if I could achieve the typical “alvin look” (hand draw, but computer inked) cartoon with a simpler kit. Turns out I could, and it was easy once I assemble the right tools.

I started as usual with a pencil sketch in my sketch book. Then did some basic inking of the main linework. Now the tricky bit, how to scan it and clean it up. Using a camera gives a grey image with poor line definition and uneven illumination. Not the greatest starting point for cartoon. Then I remember a utility that I had reviewed years ago that lets a cameraphone function like a scanner. That system is still around but a quick look on the android app market revealed CamScanner. It worked like a charm, not only doing the basic scanner stuff, you can adjust for perspective, cropping and stretching the image and it will also write to nice compact PDF files.

Then I just used paint.net, a much under-rated general graphics program, to do the colour fill, and linework tidy up. I then did a bit of magic wand selection to cut and paste my characters onto at photo I had taken. Ok it took a lot longer than the 30 minutes I had set myself in the quick pic days, However developing the new technique was fun on a rainy afternoon.


See the final cartoon below

There are a couple of earlier post about my original technique and then the Big Step Forward.

Alvin at the Noorderzon Festival

Alvin enjoy’s trying out a dutch version of the port-a-loo just for blokes

The Noorderzon festival is current on in Groningen, the Netherlands.

IF:: Asleep

Alvin has learned to feign sleep whenever it is time to mow the lawn.

for IllustrationFriday 's topic asleep.