Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am an illustrator, sometime cartoonist, sometime humorist, or some combination of the three. Maybe an illustrationist? What I do is illustrations, cartoons and the occasional humor bit. Very convenient the way who I am and what I do sync up like that.

When not gainfully employed I play around with terrycolon.com which I do mainly for my own amusement and to keep the brain gears from rusting in my down time. Anyway, they say practice makes perfect. Though if you practice wrong then I suppose you'll do things perfectly wrong.

Considering the follow-up questions below, we can pretty much forget about the humorist claim in my bio because there's nothing in hardware or software that helps me with humor. At least, I haven't found a "make funny" function on my computer.

The above who-I-am and what-I-do is my public persona. My private life, on the other hand, I choose to keep to myself. That's why it's called private.

What hardware do you use?

I use an old G4 for scanning and a new Mac Whatever-it-is for everything else. I use two computers because, well, I'm cheap. Or thrifty, as my Scottish grandma would have said. When I got the new machine I simply didn't want to buy a new scanner or Photoshop upgrade since what I had worked fine on the creaky G4.

I can't tell you much about my hardware because I'm blissfully oblivious about it. My brother, who's the propellerhead in the family, helped me pick it out. All I know is it's one of these new-fangled Macs with an operating system named after a big cat of some sort. (Puma, ocelot, cerval? I dunno.) Beyond that, as far as I can tell computer coding is some kind of key-stroked, modern spell casting. Nerd voodoo.

And what software?

Here's my working process:

1. Sketches with pencil and marker on tracing paper.
2. Finished drawings in marker on tracing paper.
3. Line art scanned into Adobe Photoshop at 300dpi. Scans cleaned up where needed.
4. Transfer file between computers with Verbatim memory stick sneakernet.
5. Bitmap art imported into Adobe Illustrator and converted to vector art.
6. Vector images assembled, edited and colored in Illustrator.

It's easy as one-two-three, even though it's actually six steps in case you didn't pay close attention. Yeah, the step 4 sneakernet is cheesy. Did anything above make you think I'd know how to network my computers?

I build terrycolon.com with BBEdit. Not that I know it's better than anything else, but that's what they used for Suck.com and so I just went with it. I upload to the web with Filezilla because I got it free. Like I said, thrifty.

What would be your dream setup?

I don't dream of setups. Though I sometimes dream I'm at the computer doing illustrations. Which is really annoying because I never save the work and don't get paid for it.