Now just before I had gone to id Software in Dallas, in the week I had free after leaving Midway Studios Austin, I had agreed to help my friend Jeremy Howa do a little iPhone game for his pre-startup company.  I believe they were working at the boss’s upstairs pool table at the time I pitched in and helped them out by doing the artwork.  I also named the game, “TriniTower;” which was to become somewhat of a recurring task.

TriniTower was a three-tower solitaire game, light in artwork, but the artwork needed to be high quality, or so I thought.  I did a few mockups, and had Jeremy come over to the house and review them, and we had game design talks as we changed artwork and scope on the fly.  At the time, Jeremy and I were technically the only ones on the team, as John and Brian Howard, the ones funding the project, were busy at another software design establishment.  This was my first taste at iPhone development, and I was pretty lost.

Luckily, Jeremy had picked up a fresh new Mac Mini for development, and begun the painful process of converting his programming skills over to the Mac platform.  I still developed artwork on a PC.  The art doesn’t care where it’s made, but we had to assemble it on the Mac.

After a whirlwind week of design, art production, execution, programming and testing, we had what was a playable game, and were progressing pretty fast, when the time came for Katie and me to move to the Dallas area so I could start work at id.  Jeremy and I continued work on TriniTower over high-speed Internet connection, IM, email and Skype.  We would use these remote connection methods to hold meetings over the Internet.  Often times we would discuss a change over Skype, I would edit the artwork, email it over to Jeremy, and he would recompile the game on his end, and hold up the iPhone to the webcam and show me how it looked, animated, etc.  Rinse and repeat till we were done, and that’s how our first iPhone game was done: partly in person, partly over webcam chat, email and Instant Message.

I had definitely never developed like this before, but it wasn’t bad.  Our next foray into the iPhone field was a reskin of John and Brian’s first iPhone app “PocketDyno:” an accelerometer based portable dyno app for testing your car’s speed.  This time, the project was done completely over instant message chat, Skype webcam and email.  I never even saw in person the project working until well after we were done with the complete artwork overhaul.

Three or four months before the first round of layoffs at Midway Austin, Jeremy was carpooling to work in the “grandma car.”   This was the affectionate name of the Chrysler Jeremy picked me up in every other workday.  During the ride, we’d talk about the ArduiNIX project we were toying with, along with a stack of half- baked game ideas.  One such game idea that so persistently occupying the conversations I finally dubbed “Dungeon Defense.”

DD was an absolutely elegant concept.  The tower defense genre was at its height of popularity at the time, as was World of Warcraft®.  Jeremy and I had talked about a fantasy style game that would generate random dungeons, and be kind of like a Diablo clone for the iPhone, but for the iPhone, the game concept had to be scoped way down. There was no way we could have pulled off the amount of content required to do that kind of game justice.  It was at that point we came up with the idea of flipping the concept of a “dungeon crawler” game upside down by framing the player as the dungeon. Instead of the player venturing forth and fighting monsters for loot and exploring dungeons, in DD you WERE the dungeon, defending your loot and treasure from invading heroes who want to defeat you..  This idea became more attractive as we realized we could scope it down justifiably, and introduce elements of the tower defense genre as well, by creating a game that everyone can relate to in its setting, but a new twist on how you play it.  It was truly novel, and doable on the iPhone platform. When Jeremy told me one day they were doing DD, I had a moment of sadness that I wasn’t there to contribute.

By this time, I was growing very weary of the daily 2 hour commute to id, and with a few other compelling reasons to head back to Austin, I had begun talking to Jeremy about if they needed an artist for the freshly minted InMotion Software studio.  My friend Marshall Womack had been filling the artist duties for some time, but was about to head over to Twisted Pixel to work on Splosion Man for XBOX.  A quick phone call to John Howard one evening after work, and it was set.  After 7 months at one of the best and most respected game companies in history, I would turn in my two weeks notice at id, and Katie and I would move back to Austin.

I came on board with InMotion halfway through DD Development.  It was odd being in a studio full of MacBooks, Mac Minis, etc.  InMotion had definitely grown since the boss’s pool table.  Everyone was going through the same pains of adapting to Mac except for me, who was still cranking out artwork on the PC.

After Dungeon Defense had mild initial success, we made two more add on campaigns, when sales of DD began to slip, and as a team we decided to take a breather before moving on to the next tower defense style game.  The short “two-week” project Jeremy suggested in a moment of brilliance was a dig dug/motherlode style game where you dig up treasure, sell it for upgrades, and return to the deep to hunt for more treasure.

I took this opportunity to put on my naming hat again and I called it “I Dig It.”  The name was at first scowled at; and other names suggested, but I stuck to my guns.  I Dig It was not only WHAT you did in the game, but also a subtle forced declaration of how you felt about it.  A positive review spun right into the very name of the game.  How could it go wrong?  You couldn’t say the name of the game without also telling people you liked it at the same time.  It even had the letter “I” in it, which had already become so cliché in the iTunes store that anytime we saw a new app like iLawnmower, we cringed.  But I Dig It?  That wasn’t bad. 

The two-week project began with only Jeremy and me working on the tech and concept.  I started feeding Jeremy artwork, and he plugged it in very quickly.  By the end of two weeks we had the tech demo working, but no real game. As we realized this might be a larger project, Brian finalized work on the Dungeon Defense updates and switched over to I Dig It. Now I like having artistic control on a project, but I had never been the ONLY artist on a team that had actually done anything this big with so few people.  At that time, the InMotion team consisted of Jeremy and Brian, the programmers; me the artist; and Johnny “Cash” Howard, who was the funding behind this endeavor.  The problem with a game team that is structured that way was that we would take the entire team down for design discussions.  We had no full time game designer on staff, so it took all of us at once to hammer out the mechanics of the gameplay.  About three quarters of the way through I Dig It Development, we got the bright idea to hire a designer.  We put out a call to Chris “Cookie” Graham as he was parting company with FizzFactor downtown.  Cookie had worked with Jeremy and I at Midway, and we knew he could handle the job.  As Cookie came on board, we saw instant productivity benefits, as the programmers could focus on the tech, and Cookie delivered on the fun.

When we wrapped up I Dig It, and released it, we realized a few things about Apple, iPhone development, and marketing an indie game.  With Jeremy and I used to being at gigantic game studios that have people on staff to take care of marketing and promotion, we had never sat down and thought about how to promote our iPhone games.  When we released TriniTower, we just kind of patted it on the back and tossed it to the wind, hoping someone would see it, like it, and buy it.  With Dungeon Defense, and a great deal more time and money invested, we had a bit of a different expectation on the return on investment of development.  However, we still had no real knowledge of how to promote our game, since other people had always been tasked to do that before.  A break came when a Google search turned up an iPhone game review site called Touch Arcade that had a forum member post a positive review of Dungeon Defense almost the day it came out.  This led us to start working the forums, watering the grassroots marketing effort that we were beginning to recognize and cultivate.  Had we known about Touch Arcade and similar sites when we released TriniTower, or hyped Dungeon Defense pre release on such sites, we would have stood a greater chance at success.

Now when the light at the end of the tunnel started to break its twinkly self through the darkness of project development, we realized we had to learn our marketing lessons and learn them fast.  We had a great deal more money and time invested in I Dig It than we had planned for, and we actually were hoping to turn a profit at this iPhone game biz.

So we set out to light a fire under every media contact, every forum, and every possible method of getting the word out that we had a good game, and it was for sale. We wrapped up the game in its current state, and sent it off to Apple.  Then the waiting began.  At this point in the process, you’re pretty much completely at Apple’s whim.  They approve the application, or don’t.  They promote the application, or don’t.  With thousands of apps hitting the store every week, if you don’t catch the attention of someone at Apple, you get buried.  And that’s right where we were.

Sales were not dismal, but they were not reflective of the quality we thought we had invested in this game.  We began entertaining the idea of becoming a non-game studio, app a day, lower production value apps or games.  We were considering just trying to “make it up in volume” when we started getting good word from people on the forums.  What really started turning us around was word from one post that said our game was being passed around the Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference like the “swine flu.” A day later, we got an email from Apple.  To paraphrase, it amounted to “Dear InMotion, we love your app.  We would like the artwork and materials needed in order to do a possible feature on you in the iTunes store.”

I cranked out the artwork and sent it to them, only to hear nothing.

It was like we were beating our fist against the monolith that was Apple, and they were not shedding any love for our “out of nowhere” studio.  Meanwhile lesser quality titles from studios that have more intimate connections with apple got featured left and right.  We went back to Dungeon Defense, what we thought was our tried and true Intellectual Property, and began cranking on a new map expansion in an attempt to boost sales of that title.

Then Touch Arcade did a front-page feature and review on their site praising I Dig It.  At this point, we dropped the price to $0.99 in an attempt to get I Dig It into the top 100 games, which was our goal. It got there, and kept going.  As soon as it started catching the attention of iPhone gamers, we got word from friends abroad that it was climbing the charts at a blistering pace in Canada, Japan, Russia and other countries.  However, in the US we were nowhere.  Apple wouldn’t feature us like they said they would, and we were beginning to hound our one contact at Apple to find out why.  Finally, the price drop to $0.99, coupled with a hailstorm of forum posts, podcast reviews, and other efforts began to push I Dig It up the US Charts.  Slowly at first, but then every day it was up a notch.  Then up several places in the list, then finally after what seemed like months, we broke the top 100 paid games, then top 100 paid Apps, then we really started shooting up the lists.  By the time Apple finally decided to do a feature on I Dig It, we were the #9 top paid app in the country.  We sat around the studio watching in disbelief the Thursday I Dig It hit the #1 Top paid app in the world, displacing the Moron Test.  It stayed at that level for about 6 days, and we started rolling the updates to keep it as fresh as possible and delay the slow retreat down the charts.

This experience has been truly unique in my career.  While working on big budget titles I never saw the kind of success I have seen with this little independent title.  I have never had such daunting tasks, or so much fun and satisfaction.  I have never had to strain my talents to the breaking point so much, yet have never been rewarded for doing so to this extent.  We’re working on the sequel to I Dig It now, and hopefully we have learned enough to repeat our success.  Dealing with this side of Apple takes some getting used to. We have to learn how to work the system, but it’s a load of fun getting there.  You might say I dig it.  And yes, I still make art on a PC.

Font nuances are many and, unless you are a font expert, it can be very difficult to recognize the subtle combinations of elements as a specific type face. Sometimes it’s an easy match. If the original artwork is mine, i usually have to depend onmy memory or dig up the original files. If I am adapting a logo for web use, I usually start with the usual suspects:

In the case of a recent client- SleepytimeStore.com/blog- I had to resort to asking the client for the original logo file. And I still didn’t know which font was used.

What The Font

Recently, my morning coffee reading brought me to Taylor Loran’s Blog- I’m A Designer. 

I like this blog. I get to rediscover websites I used to visit on a regular basis (like Coudal Partners ) and remind me I have stopped receiving the bi-weekly Photojojo newsletter.

So when Taylor recommended What The Font I was intrigued.

How It Works

It is actually quite intriguing.

First, upload an image containing the font to be identified.

In my case, I placed the white logo text on a black background for a sharp contrast. The upload page has some recommendations to speed up the process. Of course, I uploaded the logo text as big as I had it- which really wasn’t very big. The body of the lowercase letters were approximately 16 pixels high.

After uploading, the site requests your help to identify each character.

Then it gives you its best guess.

Did I mention its free?

Visit the site at http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ and check it out.

Step 1. Using the circle shape tool from the tool bar make a circle holding the “shift” key which will help constrain proportions.

Step 2. Using the gradient tool and the default gradient blend drag from the center and get close to the edge, but don’t go past it, that is very important in this process.

Step 3. With the circle shape still selected use the gradient tool and just touch the area that you want the highlight to pinch toward. You can aim it in any direction you want but for this project you will need it to aim at the top. Once you get this correct you can remove the stroke from the shape if yours has one.

Step 4. With the shape selected go ahead and drag whatever two colors you want to use, one at a time, and replace the black and white colors already in place. We will be adding a third color to the gradient shortly.

Step 5. You can make nearly any shape you want but the more simple you keep it the cleaner the glossy look will appear. Try to keep the shape you make with the pen tool move away from the center like the shape above shows. Keep your color choice in the same color family and a bit darker, but not much darker than your darkest color in your shape for this exercise. Unless you’re very aware of color harmonies, just stick to this for now.

Step 6. Using the shape tool make an oval and place it near the top of the circle shape and color it white. This is where we will get into gradient transparency blends available in CS4 that does not require transparency masking.  Make sure your shape is centered with the background circle for this.

Step 7. Apply a gradient to the new oval shape and make both colors white. Using other colors, such as black, will have some odd coloring effects when blending to a Zero (0) opacity over another color. So for the highlight just keep it white. Go ahead and set one of the white swatches to an opacity of 0. As you can see in the screenshot provided for this I’ve circled the important areas. Be sure to have the blend direct face downward.

Step 8. At this stage you will need to add a third color to help with the reflection. You can also do this at Step 4 but you can choose for yourself. Using the Direct selection tool move the darker color over to the left a bit and add a lighter swatch of your choice by dragging a swatch color from the swatch palette and dropping it on the gradient bar. At this point you can experiment a bit with color if you choose. Just keep in mind that your reflection shape on the lower part of the ball will need to blend into what ever color you choose.

Step 9. I’ve adjusted my main gradient a bit so the lighter reflection would be closer to the edge of the ball. Also, I’ve applied my gradient to the reflective shape on the ball to achieve a better and cleaner color transition. This helps convey more depth. At this stage you can add an oval shape behind your shape and set up for the shadow. This will help with the appearance of 3D.  Try to make the center of the shadow touch the bottom circle. By lowering it you can also give the appearance that it’s floating.

Step 10. In CS4 there is a new tool for gradient call “ Gradient Annotator ” which will pop up when you use the gradient tool. If it doesn’t show up when using look for it under View> Show Gradient Annotator. The handle on this tool will function a few of ways. As you can see in the screenshot the anchor area on the right, also showing my direction of the gradient, will expand the gradient proportionally either in or out. The anchor on top will compress the gradient downward to for an oval gradient. Using this tool and saving it to a legacy file can sometimes have some unwanted effects such as stepped shape gradients or rasterizing. If you choose to save it down it’s best to close the file then reopen it and check on any visual or structural changes. Be sure to check the file in “outline” mode which can be found under the view menu.

Step 11. In this step you can see the finished result of the use of the Gradient Annotator.

Step 12. Adding the details. You can see that I’ve added two minor light reflections at the top and I’m in the process of making the finger holes. Using the Shape tool make a two circles, one offset a bit from the other. The angle will be your choice depending on where you want the holes to be placed.

Step 13. Using the Pathfinder palette. By selecting both circles and clicking on the “divide” button in the Pathfinder palette I was able to cut and remove the unnecessary part of the finger hole.

Step 14. After copying and pasting two more finger holes, I used the same gradient that is in the ball and converted in to a linear gradient then applied it to the shapes. Select the three holes and get ready to tweak the perspective using the Free Transform tool.

Step 15. Finished piece. After playing with the Free Transform tool a bit you should be able to get the correct angle you need to finish this piece out nicely. Keep in mind that this is a simple shape to do this with so I hope to add a few more complex versions of this example soon.

For more information about these new features, visit Adobe’s Illustrator page for an introductory video.

All the basic features are documented, the information easily accessible and very well organized. Most of the tools are self-explanatory so I didn’t feel the need to read the 1st chapter: The Working Environment.

Chapter 2: Creating, Opening & Placing Images

While most of us can skip the part about opening a file, or placing an image, I do suggest you browse page 16 where the  Photo Browser Palette is explained. Pixelmator makes it easy to integrate your iPhoto library.

Don’t miss the explanation of iSight integration on page 17.

If you are new to image editing or you are unfamiliar with standard Photoshop-style tools, skim through Chapter 3: Selection which describes all the tools involved in selecting sections of an image and how to create quick masks from your selection.

Chapter 4: Painting and Retouching

Page 29 has  a very description of Blending Modes. The blending of layers is the foundation of most intermediate and advanced image manipulation techniques so a clear understanding of mode is helpful.

A quick tip I learned while browsing thru the manual is the use of the Caps Lock key to toggle between the brush cursor and the actual shape and size of the brush.

Chapter 8: Color Adjustments
This chapter offers quick options for color correcting and enhancing images. I particularly like the "Colorize" options which allows you colorize the image or selection according to the foreground color.

Chapter 10: Distortion Filters
This chapter is jam-packed with a solid description of the effects and options of all the available filters. My three favorites so far are: Hole (on pg 54), Kaleidescope (on pg 62), and Color Monochrome (pg 63).

The Transition filters (pg 66) are also a great deal of fun and they offer effects I really didn’t expect to find in an inexpensive image editor.

Next: A Tour of The Gradient Palette. Really.
 

_{*** Caveat: The Developers of Pixelmator have a new version of The app due at the end of February AND they are re-writing the manual. As soon as the new manual is available I will update this post.}

The irony of being an artist:

For that reason, it is deeply rewarding for me to read David Alison’s column. He entertains all apps he stumbles across candidly, unburdened by old school mac snobbery. It is because of him I found Pixelmator.

And because of him, I found Skitch.

I probably spend 25% of any paying job creating tutorials for the end user, another 25% grabbing screenshots of the work-in-progress to send off for approval. So it is vital that my screengrabber be versatile, fast- loading and easy to use.

GRAB, mac’s native screen capture uitility, will only save to tiff files, requiring that I open the screenshot in an image editor. The only advantage to this app is the timed screen grab, a 10 second delay that allows the capture of  drop down menus when documenting program details for a tutorial. For the last year, Imagewell has been my go-to-app for screen capture and annotating but i find the size claustrophic at time.

Enter Skitch.

The webpost function is what is so impressive. Join Skitch.com and you can automatically upload the resulting images, you can edit the image and "reskitch". You can also add your flickr account, .mac, or ftp. 

Catch my Skitch uploads at http://skitch.com/madbadcatgraphics/

plasq even created a video for those people unwillling to read the instructions (like me)

App after app, plasq delivers amazing and whimsical products. Kudos, dudes!

Many of my Photoshop worklow techniques are based on lessons learned from Photoshop gurus like Matt Kloskowski and Scott Kelby. I wondered while I waited for Photoshop to load if I could color correct an image in Pixelmator and achieve similar results. When I launched Pixelmator later that same day to look around for a "High Pass" filter or its equivalent, I didn’t expect a menu called "Generator".

Curiousity got the best of me and off on a tangent I went. This is a brief introduction to some of these filters.

The Generator Menu offers: Checkerboard, Lenticular Halo, Star Shine, Stripes, Sunbeams, Constant Color and Random Generator. The Constant Color Filter generates a solid field of color based on your foreground color so I won’t bother with it. Use the paint bucket. Now, why is it called generator? I don’t know, because it generated interest?

Checkerboard:

When chosen, this command creates a checkerboard based on the foreground and background colors in your tool menu.
The Options Palette give you the option of adjusting the width and sharpness.

Lenticular Halo:

It cannot really be compared to Photoshop’s Lens Flare Filter but it still offers an effect easy adjustable by all the available options in its palette. definitely a filter to become familiar with for future designs…
 

Star Shine & Sunbeams:

Easily add reflections and twinkles with these two filters.
 

Stripes:

The options are similar to checkerboard.

Random:

The Random Generator resulted in what I can only compare to a marriage between the Noise and Pointillize filters in Photoshop.

Next: A look At the Gradient Palette

_{*** The sample image is from costi at Sxc.hu and available for download free at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1136071}

The advantage of this method is simple: edit the base layer and you edit the shape of the composite image.

The Basics

1. Create or choose your base layer.  By default, any new layer is called "untitled". I have renamed mine "base layer" for the sake of clarity.

Keep in mind that the visible content of the base layer becomes the visible shape of the content above it. Any areas in this layer that are transparent will remain transparent  in the composite image as well.

2. Create a new layer  above the base layer or  or drag a layer from another image onto the base layer. as seen here,  i have dragged a layer from another file onto my example file.

3. Create the "clipping mask" .
select your new layer then Layer > Create Clipping Mask (alternately, you can Option + Apple+G)

Add additional layers as needed by repeating this step. Drag and drop the overlying layers in any order that best suits your design.

As an additional refinement, note that any of the layers involved can have its opacity adjusted and the blending mode as a number of  choices.

(I do miss the layers menu that Photoshop offers with the layer palette but that is more habit than anything else..)

Familiarity with Photoshop is helpful in learning Pixelmator. Once you get over the look of the UI, it is very easy to adjust to Pixelmator. See the quicktime movie of  My First Attempt to Create a Clipping Mask with Pixelmator. After a couple of false starts, i was able to find all the relevant tools quickly. It was very easy, making Pixelmator an cheap and reliable substitute for Adobe Photoshop.

My first real attempts at using Pixelmator were to create composite images for a client (Toy-TMA.com) without reading the manual.

A Quick Composite (8.64)

An 3 Image Composite (14mb)

Let’s briefly look at the GUI. The first thing I recognized as an Apple ProApps user was the "I am a serious program" gray background, which sets the tone for Magiq’s introduction. It could possibly be intimidating to those familiar with Deluxe. But once you get passed that who-rearranged-my-furniture feeling, the GUI does make sense. The top has a navigation strip for browsing pages and some general options.

The toolbar on the left contains most of your custom options for each item selected within Magiq. It also has a wonderful feature in the enigmatic button named "Focus." When something is selected within Magiq, you hit the Focus button and it will lock down everything in your document except that isolated item. From there you can safely modify it without interfering with other parts of the comic. This is a great boon for content creators who have many objects and items. In order to get back to the whole document, simply click the button. The "Front" button duplicated the "Arrange" menu item in Deluxe (an identical feature of the same name in Adobe apps.)  This allows an object to be pushed forwards and backwards in order to have the right overlapping desired.

The bottom toolbar has word balloons, captions, FX lettering, and templates. It is set as a default to "ALL" which I like to keep on. However if you don’t have as much screen real estate, you can select individual views by clicking on the icons representing the different components.

The toolbars to the right contain your templates and panel layouts, the browser, and thumbnails of the selected content of your browser.

In the middle is your workspace. Like Deluxe, most everything in Maqiq is drag and drop. Here I already selected my template, and dragged a layout over from Panel Layouts.

One important word about the browser:

It will not automatically refresh. Which means any new content added will not show up.  This can be easily remedied by clicking this icon located in the upper right corner.

Let’s make a comic!

When you open Magiq, pick a blank layout to start with.

After it loads up and you see the GUI, go to Comic Life Magiq>Preferences. I set my "New comics filter images" to 300 dpi.  I want to make sure when I do my export that the image will be of good quality. Going from 300 to 72 dpi should be a lot cleaner than going 72 to an even lossier 72 dpi.  Also from Preferences, you can turn off sounds should you not find them amusing. Also, you can customize the library browsing, and units of measurement.

Next, go to File>Page Layout. From here you can select from a plethora of media sizes which have been expanded greatly from Deluxe. The Tao of I.T. Al is a custom layout of 600×600. I created this setting by setting the size I wanted and then applied it. To make it a template, simply go to File>Save As Template.  It will then show up at startup with your other templates.

When done, go to "Panel Layouts" in the right toobar and select a layout. Start dragging images from the browser, also on the right. If your folder is not showing up, you can drag it into the browser. And good news for those who like organization…it remembers this folder whenever you relaunch the program. As you drag your layouts and pictures, don’t worry If it is not exactly right. We can further modify it.  Notice when you click once on image, you see panel editing handles.  Clicking twice creates the image handles. In either case, you get this outline with tools:

The top purple arrows allow you to rotate. The bottom green arrows move the selection. The green handles around the image resize it. 

What is most interesting is the bottom orange tool, which calls up this popup toolbar:

This toolbar allows you to edit the paths on your objects, much like a vector graphic program (like Illustrator) would.

• The first icon is the Shape chooser, which brings up a popup menu where you can turn your object into a variety of polygons.
• The second is the selection tool, which is pretty much like every selection arrow tool known to man.
• The third icon is the line bending tool, which allows you to grab a point and turn it into a convex or concave curve.
• The fourth is the Line/corner smoothing tool which smooths out paths by straightening lines and rounding corners.
• The fifth and six icons are the Add Point and Remove Point tools respectively. The last two are the Add Part and Remove Part Tool, which will come in handy later when we get to word balloons.

When you select your image, you’ll notice this icon to the upper right of your selection: 

When clicked, this will open up a graphics palette that will allow you to manipulate your images.

The Graphics Palette contains the following choices:

1. Colors contains various color correction and manipution tools, as well as inversion and cropping.
2. Cut-Out contains tools for cutting out parts of the image, chroma keying, appyling shapes, and masking options.
3. Warp adds distortion effects similiar to photoshop and liquifying tools.
4. Skin (pictured above) is interesting as it allows you to paint some textures into a graphic. Here I took some "flames" and applied them to the background to make it look like the building caught on fire. Filter is the familiar photo filter options. Paint allows you to paint several types of brushes directly on top of your image. "Reset Layer" will reset the image back to its former status. When you are finished, click done and it will return the edited graphic back into the normal Magiq GUI.
5. Filter, although it sounds photoshop-esque is in fact various blur tools.
6. Paint contains paint tools, including a 3d tube brush, which allows you to draw on top of your image. Right here is where you want to paint a mustache on your cousin.

Once the images are fully tweaked, it’s time to add some dialogue and captions. Simply choose the balloon or caption desired and drag it onto the canvas.

The default font is Lint McCree Intl bb 12.0. To select a different font, simply go to the left toolbar and select the "T" icon. There is an expanded list of fonts provided by Magiq, but you can also access your System fonts by selected that option at the bottom. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to reset the default font. My workaround is to copy and paste balloons already have the desired font settings.

To those familiar with Deluxe, the feature of adding a connecting balloon appears missing. However, it’s been put into the popup toolbar accessed by the orange icon.

To add, simply hit the green "plus" symbol and an additional connected balloon will appear. This can be moved into a different position with a simple click and drag. To remove the additional balloon, select it and then hit the red "minus" symbol.

To make extra tails, do the same thing by clicking on the Add Part tool. To remove, click on the Remove Part and then the tail.

Note here that you can edit the balloon paths much like any other object in Magiq.

When you are done, go to File>Export. You will see a plethora of tabbed options with various configurations. You can send it to Email and Flickr (which has options for permissions on viewership.) HTML creates a webpage with thumbnails of your comic whichcan be used "as is" or be taken into your favorite HTML editor and be further manipulated. Image gives you the options to export as JPEG, GIF, PNG, or TIFF. You can also export it to iPhoto, iWeb, or as a PDF.

Congratulations. You have a comic!

If I had one gripe, it is that Magiq does present a problem to Deluxe users as you cannot open a Deluxe document within Magiq. If you have a large backlog of Deluxe documents, this creates a problem should you need to re-open Deluxe in order to back up and edit your comics to another medium.  For now you need both programs if you plan to migrate.

Sure enough, at the end of the session a question arose, just as I had expected "What do we do when we no longer have access to school machines and software?" A good question. Even though Adobe’s Academic Pricing Policy deeply discounts Photoshop for students, in these economic times, even that price is beyond the means of many students.

Usually when asked about an alternative to Photoshop I recommend Photoshop Elements from Adobe, but our webmaster suggested that I also look at Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com) which is an image editor with a similar look to Photoshop and is touted as "… image editing for the rest of us" and at $59.00 US it just might be. It runs on Macintosh OS X 10.5.5 and later. So I downloaded a copy and tried it out.

Pixelmator weighs in at a 121.2 MB in size download (56.6 MB compressed) for the basic application and an excellent 81 page manual can be downloaded separately at the Pixelmator.com website.

Pixelmator reminds me of what I remember Photoshop 3 (or perhaps 4) was like (I’ll have to depend upon memory here as I no longer have copies of the older versions of Photoshop before the CS versions, and I no longer have a computer that would run them even if I did) but, in their day they were the state of the art, and with it I did some fabulous work. Pixelmator can do equally as well and is a bargain at the price.

Visually, it resembles Photoshop though it is slightly limited in tools and abilities. The learning curve is minimal. Any student who has had an introduction to Photoshop should have no trouble picking up the operation of Pixelmator.

For the student on a limited budget but who does own a Mac computer, I now have an additional suggestion for a Photoshop substitute. It isn’t Photoshop but it will do a good basic editing job and is neither as daunting nor as expensive as Adobe’s flagship product.

If you are a Mac user on a tight budget, Pixelmator is definitely worthy of consideration.

Read Alicia Vogel’s review of Pixelmator here.

In the future I’m going to do all my pre-painting in Pixelmator and then tweak either in Photoshop or Painter.  I’ll see how December’s Al works with it.

It does lack the gazillion brushes that either program has, so I did have to rehash some old tricks back when Photoshop was 3.0.  But it’s just plain fun to work in.

I would say this piece took me around five hours, and it’s more than decent groundwork. I did a similiar type piece using a combination of Painter and Photoshop, and it took twice as long.  The traits that Pixelmator has in common with Photoshop and Painter combined with it’s simplicity makes it a joy to use and keeps me concentrated on the actual painting instead of being all fidgety with the brushes and options.  I also realized yesterday as I was putting some refining moves on it that the final results look like my non-digital acrylic paintings.

On the negative side, I really missed my palette knife tool.  And I couldn’t find a use for Pixelmator’s "starry" brush.