Oh No!  Poor Claire!  This is part one of a short story arc, so stay tuned.

It never fails that when families are at their busiest that is the moment that something catastrophic happens.  Hope has a busy day (and week) with work and mid-term exams.  Harry is busy too with work.  And Claire has been busy being a kid – which often times involves falling off a bike.

Behind the Scenes

Preliminary Review of Astropad.

I have been struggling a bit with the digital comic for a while.  I’m finding that I’m not getting the look I want with the tablet I have been using and I really wanted to try out a Cintiq because it seems like it would be more like “real” drawing to me.

Well I discovered an app for the iPad called Astropad and it’s only $30 CDN (which is way less than a Cintiq.)  So I thought I would give it a whirl.  It does exactly what it says it will do.  It acts like a Cintiq in many ways and mirrors a section of your screen (I did not set it to mirror the full screen but a healthy chunk)  It also has a pop out menu on the side that has eight “buttons” you can program for your most common commands (like pen, move, eraser, zoom in…. etc).  It works for Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketchbook Pro and Manga Studio (and other programs that I don’t use on a regular basis)

I did not have any of the styluses that they recommend, but did have a Bamboo Fineline.  And now I remember why I stopped using the Fineline after I got it last year.  The stylus doesn’t actually register the mark on the screen where you touch the screen with it, but rather a few millimeters off.  This makes doing fine work super irritating.  I’m reminded again how irritated I am that Wacom would produce such a shoddy product when so much of their other stuff works so fantastically.

But back to the app.  So far I am happy with it.  I am going to get a proper stylus for it and run through some more comics with it.  Next week I should have a more definitive review.

Also a bit of shameless self-promotion in a reminder that I do have a Patreon Account and given the number of Band-Aids we have gone through this week a few bucks could certainly help the cause.