The online customer Printer I use for my artwork has decided to stop offering short-run print services. They have now instated a 25 copy minimum for any print run. I thought maybe I was missing something on their website, but I called their customer service department and they confirmed it.

What’s frustrating is they are still very affordable even with the minimum requirements. I need to make a choice whether to use them at all even when I have a need to print 25 or more of anything. The other frustrating bit is I have been framing my art in software at 11″x17″, the size their printers output. Granted, I have always worked within 11″x14″ because that is a standard Wal-Mart sized frame. If I find another affordable vendor, I don’t want to lose image quality because of it.

This is a very valuable lesson though: Don’t trust a vendor to offering the same product or service indefinitely. I could have learned that from just about anywhere in the last 25 years of my life by looking around and simply watching, but I have never personally been burned by this phenomenon.

I’ve been drawing an awful lot lately. Just like my other phases, it comes and goes, but I do love doodling on some paper or sketching in Photoshop; it’s very soothing and meditative to draw for extended periods of time.

I can see why some people engage in addictive behavior though. It is so enjoyable for me, that other things slide like chores and even remembering to bathe and feed myself.  I’m surprised my stress-rash hasn’t popped up lately. Maybe the drawing is a healthy outlet for dealing with the ’shit happens’ in my life? Except for the basic human needs and hygiene thing…

With the volume of output I’ve got going on lately, I really should collect the complete and mostly complete work I’ve got, package it up, advertise and sell it on an online store here. Doing that would legitimize my absent-minded fasting. Of course I need to polish the mostly complete stuff, but feh, that’s “trivial.”

After I get that done, I could dig into the file of sketches I’ve got going or scans of work languishing in archive for more material, and I could go even further back and look into my filing cabinet or any of my dozens of notebooks for doodles. There is a limit to this madness of course. If I go too far back, the quality of artsmanship goes way down and I don’t really care to share that stuff. Also, I say “trivial” as I have to make the decision to stick with the particular style a work started off as or scrap it and make it Modern Steve.

This isn’t a bad plan though, I might be able to get some extra coin from this by selling prints. Fortunately I’ve had the foresight to work at a ridiculously high resolution for a long time now so printing will be trivial. See? No quotes that time!

After a long absence, I have something to show you! No, it didn’t take a month to make. But this is the result of a conversation Ame and I had about Hello Kitty vs. Darth Vader:

Wicked sick, eh? I feel it’s pretty spot-on and couldn’t be any more perfect.

The Kindle from Amazon is a super-cool device and I want one simply because it’s a gadget. For now, I’ve got my iPod Touch though and that’s good enough for me (so no, Ame I don’t really want one!). Also, I say Kindle, but I really mean all e-book reader devices. The portability is amazing, and, I know I hate the environment, but the paper-savings are enormous (a quick sidebar though – for all the R&D placed into the Kindle, is there really a net-gain?).

I’ve not used or even seen a Kindle in person, so all I have to go on are reviews and hearsay, but I hear the display technology is what puts it over the top: it looks and receives light like real paper with real ink on it. The only problem is there’s one page and, for all intents and purposes, nailed to the device.

The device I want is very simple to imagine. In short, it is the only book you will ever own. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe my favorite book and backtrack later – it’ll make more sense this way, I promise.

Imagine a nice-sized hardcover book at about 250 pages – not too thick, not too daunting, but just right. Each of these pages is a double-sided version of the Kindle’s superpaper technology and looks, feels, bends, and even smells exactly like paper (extra credit for bits of pulp thrown in). You can start any book you like on page one, and flip through to the end on page 250 without pushing a single button.

Well, not quite no buttons, but close. You can select which book you want to read, by using the touch interface on the front cover. To keep the aesthetic value of this book high, no touch-screens as we know them like on an iPod, but an optical projection with adequate sensors to detect what choices  are made (very much like those laser projected keyboards out there). Storing text is trivial and flash memory is ridiculously cheap and falling dramatically on top of it, so space for books is effectively unlimited.

Some questions immediately arise though. First, what if the book you want to read is not exactly 250 pages? The weasel answer is of course, “it’s up to you,” but there are some options: Have the book’s software typeset the text for you; shrink or enlarge the text to fit the space; or if there’s more than 250 pages in the book and you reach the end, place a bookmark and simply close and re-open the book to an earlier physical page and resume reading (which leads into the next point, even).

Physical bookmarks are problematic. If the text of the book can fit in those 250 pages and that is the only text you read, then a bookmark will suit you fine. You can place a bookmark, close the book, and resume reading later – just like a low-tech book today. If you change texts, the bookmark will be on the wrong page – or will it? Again, options: Changing texts when a physical bookmark is present will simply move the words to accommodate the bookmark, so when the book is opened, the last page you were on (or even the first page, if you never opened it before) will show; Ignore the bookmark and display the text to whatever page is opened – this seems a more likely and elegant solution. To elaborate on this second point, the book likely doesn’t care where you put a bookmark – it has no way of knowing what a physical bookmark is. What the book does know is on what page you were last. I submit that is all that matters to the reader; picking up where you left off.

That’s just my book though. Yours might be a paperback, or be like an unabridged War and Peace. The number of pages doesn’t even matter – it could be as few as one or as many as 10,000. The important part is there should be pages you can turn and touch. The interface and storage don’t necessarily have to be in the book itself, but certainly helps for portability. One possible scenario is the book has no interface or long-term storage, but simply an antenna with which to receive the appropriate data.

I said it would be the only book you will ever own, but really, where’s the fun in that? Sometimes you want a large hardcover, other times a magazine format. Maybe you want to scatter your house with them so you can pick up and read wherever you are. Portability is a selling point to be sure, but hey, “what if?”

I’ll leave marketing departments and focus groups to the name of this device, and you know it’ll be something stupid like Kindle. Yes, I said it. The name Kindle is terrible. You’re Amazon of all things! You’re named for a rainforest! Pick a tree that grows in the Amazon Rainforest and make sure you pick a cool sounding one! That’s enough rant for now, but I want my damn book!

I’m not an original thinker on this one (Google Image Search), but I want to make a suitable-for-framing personal take on Team Fortress 2 with female characters. There’s only one out there that’s any good, and I think I could be on par with the quality, but be thematically better.

This might take awhile, and I’m definitely going to make each individual class member full size, meaning that if I wanted to, I could make a print of just that class and be happy with its resolution. This will be my most ambitious project yet, but it is very reminiscent of something I did in high school.

I made sketches of everyone in the drumline, including myself and the directors and put them all on a shirt. It took a few retries, plenty of scanning, and laying out on a computer that could barely handle the task, but it turned out pretty awesome – and it was in glorious color! There must’ve been thirty or so people in the section, so it was no small feat to pull it all together, but I think this will be even bigger and better because:

1. Just like webcomics, nobody knows who your friends are on the Internet, so leave them out of your comic; make new characters or use pre-existing characters that people know
2. Hi-resolution baby! Each of the class members will be printable at 14 inches tall and look nice. The drumline shirt only had to look good on a t-shirt at a couple feet away
3. My computer doesn’t suck nuts!

I’ll post my progress as time permits, hopefully I’ll have at least one to show off this week!