Ahhhh the class of ‘09. Sometimes a good year, sometimes not so much. I look back on these guys with mixed feelings but a huge amount of happiness and joy.

I’ve been thinking about ex-students and the Book Draw a lot over the past couple of weeks. I’m coming up to the final months of, possibly, the last classes at my workplace and a number of students have been asking if I’ll miss them. Spoiler warning: (I will) and who knows what will happen in the future. I do know that some of the guys and gals I have worked with this have have been entertaining an fun to be with.

Which leads me to these guys: the class of ‘09 Big Book Draw version. It was a wonderful day (click on the Guildford Book Draw tab to the right for more details) but a project that often nearly broke me. For a start I had huge dreams – as with any project – and I really must learn to stop doing that. One of the dreams was to have a launch party with a difference. I made forty copies of the book (and since each copy took at least an hour to make that’s a fair chunk of time when times always a pressing). The idea was to have a night out where people who had helped on the day could be given their copy of the book at random. The next step on this project is to wrap each book in brown paper and post them to recipients and give them to those more local. It was a lovely plan. Added to that I wanted to have a storyteller there on the night to read out the story of the Dragon and his Princess and the Fish’s Library (a story I’m quite pleased with ) and it would all be lovely.

Of course it wasn’t to be. I tried but hey ho, some dreams fly too high and the reach of my net feels very limited. But I do still intend to send the books off to people, at random, and with a bit of luck the people who receive them will photograph themselves and their book and email that back to me. Then, and only then, will I know who got what.

It’s been a funny old road but one that’s kept me amused through some dips last year. Now I’m onto the semi-sequel (Wombat and Wambot) which, again, is a youth work venture and, again, will be drawn by teenagers who I’ve yet to meet and can’t wait to do so, and hopefully I’ll look back on the project in the Summer as I wrap it up and smile as much as I do with the mini-books above. We’ll see. I’ve yet to learn to stop dreaming but, since the dreams help me with the ideas in the first place I can hardly complain when the rough goes with the smooth I suppose.

In other news the final, FINAL copy of Sylver went of to the publisher today for print and release in early May. More on that when I have the time to type but youth work calls for tonight so it’s time to plod onwards on a different path…

Work proceeds apace on Wombat Wambot, my online comic drawn almost entirely in Brushes. It’s happening now at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wombat-Wambot/373739641256 with one page a day uploaded (weekdays, I deserve a break now and again) from now until July.

Or so the plan goes…

Also: Oh Apple why do you taunt me with a ‘buy your iPad now’ email when you know I am in t he UK and cannot buy one until the end of April when it’s released way off in the future two months

Updates soon, honest, but for the moment Wombat’s sit heavily on my brain.

Edit: Also also, should I post the pages here? Would that make sense? I wonder…

Hmmm drink (including coffee) seems to be informing my work a LOT at the moment. Strange. In other news down to the last three pages for Wombat part 1. Maybe it’ll lead somewhere, maybe not. Hope so but then again I tend to hope a lot of things…

So I’m in the midst of sending stuff out, which I find thunderously demoralising, and college marking for final projects, which I also find thunderously demoralising, and a change of routine and projects at the arts centre, which ain’t much fun either.

Anyhow, image from Wombat… May not be final text…

One of the loveliest things about Brushes is that you can view the work as it happened as an animated video file (although that said as soon as layers were introduced to the app it broke the animation viewer and importer with outputted data being on a level 1 – 4 basis despite the level you drew your data on – witness the fact that you can see the interior of the image drawn prior to the outlines. That said it’s still both lovely and remarkable what the lil app can do).

So here’s a video of one of the more recent pages drawn (page 14 if’n your interested). I think I’ll be outputting one vid per page, maybe, it’s certainly doable. My main issue would be sourcing music but, then again, as the music provided to this and the last video I made was made by youth group musicians maybe I’m in a good position for that one too. I like the stuff they make, certainly…

Anyhow: video below, hope you like.

Admittedly there is a smidge of recycling going on here. But hey ho, I like it and it saves me an hour which I can spend sleeping prior to the Superbowl tonight…

So that’s another thing on the list of stuff to do…..

Had an on again off again email chat with someone last night (who sounded like he had the most bizarre roller coastery day ever) and textured the meteor image and drew out a colour version of the big book draw book. Pics of the colour BBD to come but the textured meteor looks a little like this. I do think I’ll end up texturing the whole of the Wombat if time allows… We’ll see.

It’s a little bit of added Photoshop and a little bit of Pixelmator (with screensnapz at the end to grab the moment). I love Pixelmator to pieces – it’s a very groovy image editor as I’ve mentioned in the past – but it does struggle a little bit with multi layer 300 dpi images so Photoshop had to be dusted off to do a little bit of the placement.

So I lost the original image from about 3/4s of the way through. I did think about scrapping it and doing something else instead but decided to trog on regardless… Here’s the… 95% finished version? I may add a few more bits, we’ll see.

Awesome day today at times – nice to end it on a Hero Management gig. Will say more about that at some point but want to chill out to the Joystiq podcast and wind down time.

Not slowed down on the iPad interest, having now seen the keynote. I have a slight concern that the number of sensors may not be enough for such a large screen and that the feel of Brushes will be lost when the finger cannot take in the whole of the screen. It’s the same vibe I get when changing Wacom tablets, some I’ve loved, some I’ve been hugely disappointed by. I hope the iPad will be the same sort of revelatory experience that finding Brushes clicking was.

Which brings me to this. Doodled this in the bath. Yes, I know, that’s a little silly but hey ho, fancied a rest and chill out but with the chance to get some images out of my mind and onto the screen. This is definitely a place where the iPad is NOT going to go. I feel nervous enough about drawing on my iPod touch when surrounded by water (while also listening to BOL on my iPod classic which I always worry I’m going to see falling to a watery grave as well). I should change my workflow but this isn’t bad for an hour and fits a hole in the Project Wombat story.

It is something I may not end up using, that said. In one of the two occasions since buying the Brushes app it’s bodged a little. I’d just finished the image when the thing ran out of battery. No probs, I thought, it’s done that a couple of times as I’ve been drawing… But something about this time was different and when put back on charge I found the layer information flattened and, on first look, the brushes file – the one that can be upscaled rather than output at screen resolution – was corrupted and the PNG option the only one to choose. A restart of the software and copy of the file corrected that at least but layer info seems totally gone.

That’s not to say I’m unhappy. Some things are  temporary and I have thrashed Brushes to pieces and it’s been remarkably stable. One glitch in a million uses is unsurprising.

Anyhoo: onwards to sleep prior to teaching tomorrow. Night all.