Artemis Draws

After too much time away from drawing and working on the website in general, I finally had some time yesterday to tinker with Javascript. I found some excellent resources online to help me do exactly what I wanted with the latest story I am working on – The Snack Bar (up to 7 pages now…) – there is no point trying to reinvent the wheel when there are already resources available. This was Cody Lindley’s excellent Thickbox script which utilises the jQuery library. I should not really turn this drawing blog into a semi-technical one by describing in detail what I did exactly but in a nutshell, I managed to customise the scripts to jazz up my comics page, although the main comic itself has been much reduced in size. Being a wordless comic though, it is still possible to work out what is going on, and the absence of scroll bars is another benefit. So I have changed the index page for the Snack Bar, I hope it will be tested out on a wide variety of browsers and monitors eventually. I’m in the process of sprucing up and redesigning the main pages as well with yet more Javascript additions. I’m still pondering on a good logo for the website….

And I’ve also migrated from my mouse to a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet. It didn’t take a lot of time to get used to, and now I don’t use the mouse anymore, except for occasionally selecting/dragging text around, which the pen is still somewhat clumsy with. It’s a very good pen tablet but not an extremely high-end one, so I don’t know how good it is for illustration work. I find the nib a bit rotund and possibly not nearly as responsive as I’d like it to be, but then this is my very first pen tablet so I don’t have the faintest notion what the expensive models are like. I don’t see myself getting into digital art in a big way at all, and will still do all my drawings traditionally. The tablet itself is very small and perfect for my needs, I cannot see why I would never need an A4 sized tablet. Anyway the website will most likely change a fair bit over the next week or so as I get to grips with scripting again and catching up on the latest HTML standards.