It happens to every artist who’s ever owned a personal printer, after toiling for hours to put the finishing touches on your visual masterpiece, you finally power up your printer ready to materialize your baby into the real world, only to be greeted by this:

I feel a song coming on. A song called "Let's Smash the Printer!"

Now I love my printer as much as the next person, that’s why when my printer encounters even the slightest snag in performing its sole purpose of existence, I immediately look for a flat durable surface to repeatedly smash it into until it isn’t the same shape anymore. Still, wouldn’t it be great if there was a better solution for when you need to print something other than really long emails regarding your newly found state of bankruptcy?

When you buy a personal printer, what you are really paying for is the convenience to print from the comfort of your home. This setup works great for people who desire said convenience or have a business sized budget to justify the costs, but what about independent artists who want top quality but are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that their home printer is an ink guzzling, paper mutilating money sink with a penchant for grinding to a screeching halt at the slightest error? Four words…

Digital Photo Print Centers!
(Convenient & Affordable)

Well, technically 6 words and an ampersand if you count the capti… Wait! Come back! I’m serious! Although they don’t seem to advertise it for some ungodly reason, your friendly corporate giant’s digital photo printing center is an excellent place to get your art prints made at an outstanding price with surprisingly great quality that will often surpass anything a consumer inkjet can produce – and with 100% less technical problems! Many also offer unique options, such as printing a large format banner the width of a car or printing on a warm fluffy blanket suitable for strangling small mammals with – oh, and on coffee mugs too! Can’t forget coffee mugs! Not only that, but the prints are not restricted to a minimal quantity unlike offset print houses, so you can print as many or as few as you like without having to worry about what you’re going to do with the other 99,999 extra copies!

Many stores with digital photo printer centers also come with a great online system for uploading photos… errr, I mean artwork that makes it a snap to order prints (Artists kinda’ have to mentally replace every instance of the word “Photo” with “Artwork” when going to one of these sites)! As an important note,  you’ll probably have to re-crop or resize your images to match photo dimension standards (6×4, 5×7, 8×10, etc). This is especially true if you based your original artwork on a North American standard paper size (Letter, Legal, Tabloid) which is probably the most idiotic system for classifying paper by a civilization that has yet to be wiped off the planet (Legend has it that the Letter paper size was based on the length of some random dude’s forearm. The End).  It might seem like a bit of a pain, but it’s a small price to pay for paying a smaller price!

You might think it’s expensive at a glance to order by the print, but ask yourself this; how far has that $50 ink cartridge really gotten you in the last few months before drying up into a withering black sponge? Ink refill centers and DIY injector kits can save you money, but then again, you’re still the one paying for the paper and punching the lights out of the printer when it messes up, right? It also doesn’t help that the original company that made the cartridge made it as unnecessarily difficult as possible to accept 3rd party refills with a one way street microchip that refuses to reset ink indicator level. These company’s also love to tout the quality of their ink in their home printers as superior, but ask yourself this question, would you watch a movie at home instead of a theatre to get a superior experience? No! Would you buy your pizza from the corner grocery store to bake at home instead of go to a pizzeria for a superior meal? Hell no! Then why would you think printing from a home printer would give you superior prints?  - Take it to the printers!

My personal favorite Digital Photo Print Centers are:

Costco
costco.pnimedia.com (Canada)
costcophotocenter.com (USA)

Despite common belief, selling ginourmas 1.36kg boxes of Goldfish Crackers and having a kickass photo center are not mutually exclusive qualities. Costco has been one of the fastest and most reliable places to get prints that I have personally gone to, and when I say fast, I mean order online, put on your shoes and drive on over to the nearest Costco pick up the order fast – no shipping fee involved! They’re quality, although a bit on the dark side in my experience, is outstanding for the price, definitely on par with the best inkjet printers out there that don’t have a French word as a prefix.  Only downside is that you must be a Costco member to print… is that even really a downside?

Kodak Galleries
www.kodakgallery.ca (Canada)
www.kodakgallery.com (USA)

With the ability to pick up prints at any Best Buy & Future Shop (Canada) or CVS Pharmacy & Target (USA), Kodak Galleries is really the only service around that can give Costco any competition in both Canada and the US. Both are excellent services with a plethora of options, great print quality and competitive pricing. What it comes down to is what item you are specifically planning to order and which place you would rather pickup. In general, Costco is better for small volume and large format print size whereas Kodak Gallery has some great prices for orders above a certain quantity, notably their 8x10s. In my observation, Kodak Gallery also has more time sensitive special deals that might tip you over the edge in their favor if the right sale comes up at the right time.

Snapfish
www.snapfish.ca (Canada)
www.snapfish.com (USA)

If you live in the USA, you’d be hard pressed to find a better option than Snapfish. They have some of the very best prices in the business, especially on 6x4s as well as routinely awesome special deals like 20% off your entire order. It also helps that they have a superior image upload system due to being direct partners with Flickr and I could probably write a few paragraphs raving about their excellent customer support. Their print quality may also be the best of the places I mentioned, as a poster I ordered from them had noticeably superior color accuracy. To add icing on the cake, they also have pick up locations to save on shipping, including Walmart. Only one small problem though, and that’s if you live in Canada. Currently, the Canadian www.snapfish.ca isn’t quite on par with it’s American big brother in terms of special deals or pricing and doesn’t appear to have pick up options, but if you live in the USA, definitely give www.snapfish.com a shot.

Digital Photo Print Centers are  wonderful for an artist on a budget, but what if you want to spend top dollar to send your absolute best artwork to a client? Grab your wallets and get ready to explore the wonderfully (expensive) world of:

Professional Photolabs & Fineart Print Houses!
(Quality Printing & Money Disposal Facilities)

Let’s face it, most normal humans can’t tell printer quality if it repeatedly sodomized them in the face with a French Curve. You reach a point where the colors are accurate enough, there is no visible print pattern, and nobody outside of the artist themselves can tell the freaken’ difference unless they had the prints surgically engraved on their eyeballs and that might be the placebo kicking in (That or the searing agony of a thousand burning suns). This is where Professional Photolabs come in, for when you want that 10% difference and wouldn’t mind paying 1000% more to get it so that people with no artistic discernment in the slightest might be able to tell the difference – and it even matters sometimes.

In the USA, there’s a huge variety of excellent Professional Photolabs with a large spread of availability, the most famous in the business being WHCC and Miller’s  (Miller’s has a little consumer side brother named MPIX as well). Unfortunately, Canada’s professional photolabs and fine art print shops are typically segmented and only have a local serviceable area of pickup before shipping costs blast you off your budget by a few orders of magnitude. If you operate around Vancouver in British Columbia, I’m personally quite partial to Hambleton’s Fine Art Services, although it’s been a while since I’ve had the money need to print something of that caliber there.

In my limited experience, outside of what paper you print on, Giclée printing is really the only thing I’ve noticed that makes a substantial difference in quality for a digital artist. Giclée is often criticized as being a glorified inkjet, but it’s a freaken’ awesome glorified inkjet! It has a distinct advantage for digital artists who’ve had the foresight (Or lack of foresight) to create their artwork using the RGB color model, as Giclée is capable of reaching a tonal range that conventional CMYK printers cannot which I find great in my work due to my ungodly tendency to set color saturation to 100% on everything. If you’re going to take it to that level of opulence though, it doesn’t hurt to get it framed and printed on canvas either, although you might want to pay off that crippling financial debt you have on the sidelines first just in case.

Great! So now we have an option out there for quality enthusiasts (And rich people in general)! What about people who want to print off enough posters to crush a small family of rodents with? Well, for that we have the magical world of:

Offset Print Shops
(Quantity & More Quantity)

Do you have a business card with you? If so, chances are that they were made at an Offset Print Shop where quantity is quite literally everything. Offset Print Shops are a bit of a mysterious enigma, verging on the boundary between consumer and business and using base technology more than a century old, it can be a bit intimidating to dip your fingers into. This doesn’t change the fact that if you absolutely must have a number of copies with a trailing row of digits behind it, offset printing is hands down the best way to go.

One of the distinct benefits of offset printing is that the more you print, the cheaper each unit’s price gets, resulting in substantial savings in the case you want to build a paper fortress than can transform into 100,000 flyers by blowing gently on it. Offset printing is also well known for it’s crisp clear text which makes them ideal for things that you actually want people to read, like hazard signs… I like hazard signs. Unfortunately, the minimal print requirement is often an entry barrier for individuals and anti-redundancy enthusiasts in general who don’t want to print more than 50 copies of the exact same thing.

Offset Printing Houses can also be a bit complicated if you are not familiar with the technical aspects of it. There are some pretty important rules to take note of if you don’t want the print job to end in disaster as opposed to digital printing services which are more often aimed at consumers with no press preparation experience. This is why we have design schools folks!… well, either that or to make money off of a road paved with broken dreams.

I have yet to find a place in the USA that I have personally had good experiences with in the offset printing arena. However, in Canada, I highly recommend Jukebox Printing, they did some very impressive business cards for a friend of mine and have great deals if you order in the usual massive quantities typical of offset printing. Overall, offset printing is an excellent choice for when there is strength in numbers…that or you just really hate trees.

Well, there you have it folks, my little take on the wonderful world of  printing centers and their many names and variations! I have a lot to learn myself and hope to find even better options in the future! If there’s a place or procedure you’ve had good experiences with in your adventures in Print Land, please let me know! Thank you and happy printing adventures!

In all my years of drawing anime/manga art, I’ve yet to have attended a single anime convention – partially because I’m a misanthrope with a history of anti-social tendencies, but mostly because I really like staying at home a lot (Staying home is awesome!). Now I can finally cast away my convention goer virginity and say that I’ve attended my first anime convention – now with 100% less lying about the “attended” part!

Earlier this week on July 23rd, the first MiniComi convention was held in Vancouver, BC and I got my very first gig as a vendor selling prints of my artwork with all proceeds going to help Japan via the charity organization Direct Relief International. I would like to thank all those who looked through my work and purchased prints, this endeavor would not have been possible without you! – well technically, it would have still been “possible”, but  in the same way that crashing a car into a convenience store is still technically “entering” it.

The two months leading up to the event was like a crash course in Murphy’s Law 101 as prints that I’ve ordered encountered existence failure issues, unpredictable events in the town I grew up in had me emotionally divided, and my limited budget started to wear frighteningly thin so that my idea of fine dining became a hotdog from Costco (They are crazy delicious though!). Also, the whole “Massive Artist’s Block”  thing that I’ve been already going through for the last few months wasn’t doing wonders for my self confidence. In the end though, it all worked out with the help of some very good friends and family and it was worth every minute of it!

Here’s a picture of my humble little corner of heaven at MiniComi taken by fellow artist and good friend Albert of www.albertart.net, who has also written an article about the convention complete with pictures of many of the best cosplay outfits that were there! Albert was also the one who convinced me to participate in the first place to the point where he was practically dragged me across the road to do at least one convention this Summer, for which I am very grateful of now in hindsight.

A heart felt thanks also goes to a certain follower of my work on Flickr who gave me some incredible words of encouragement right at the point where I thought I had run out of options. Thank you, it meant the world to me, you know who you are out there! ^_^

Now without further ado…

The Top 5 Things I Learned about Being a Vendor at MiniComi!

1. When in doubt, you WILL run out of table space – think vertical boards, hangers or use albums or portfolios!

2. Variety might be the spice of life, but it sucks at retaining customer attention – Pick your best stuff and focus on it!

3. If it can be read, the customer will not read it – prioritize text and make the letters freaken’ ginourmas!

4. Always be open to negotiation and feedback, the customer always comes first!

5. Female cosplayers are extremely attracted to plushies in the shape of a giant Pepperidge Goldfish cracker!

Happy Valentines everybody! – The one day of the year we can blatantly tell borderline strangers that we love them and not be charged with sexual harassment!

Valentines day is also that one day of the year in Japan (Among other countries in Asia) where your entire validity as a man is determined by the amount of chocolates you secure by the end of the day from girls… go-go entire male population of Japan! Let the lack of sugary donations of goodness from the girls in your life grind your self-esteem into a fine sandy paste!

In this illustration, we have the lovely Gitynia with a super compact version of the Cross Light dress to fit an extra compact body looking for love in all the right places!… but with the wrong tool. I wanted to try super bright saturated colors this time around because I hate people who love love and love people who hate love… wait, what did I just say? Anyway, coloring with really bright colors is dangerous, don’t do it kids.

Hope all you lucky boys and girls out there with someone to love have an awesome day! Please rest assured that I will not stare at you with utter contempt as I  proceed to stalk you throughout your day to cope with personal inadequacy issues.

To commemorate Flickr’s 7th Anniversary, here’s a drawing of Flickr-tan, an anime girl persona of all things Flickr! – including gratuitous amount of surprisingly functionless blue and magenta spheres and a vomiting panda doll!

Time for a little history lesson!  Flickr was originally a prototype image hosting site created by Ludicorp located in Vancouver BC, right at the time when I was living there in fact! Surprisingly, Flickr was actually originally developed as a tool to make an MMO called Game Neverending. Game Neverending didn’t survive, but Flickr did, and on February 10th, 2004 at 5:15, Flickr took it’s first flight! Flickr was later acquired by Yahoo, but surprisingly, didn’t spontaneously implode instantly afterward.

Despite it’s inherent bias for photos over illustrations and screen shots, Flickr has easily become my favorite image hosting site to use, as they have an abnormally friendly community of surprisingly sane  humans despite the site’s enormous population which according to one law of physics or another, normally is suppose to cancel that particular part out. If you haven’t tried Flickr before, I highly recommend it, please  visit me while you are there and let me know what you’re up! I always love seeing another friendly face on Flickr!

With the holidays now a distant memory, it’s time for the academically enrolled aspiring artist to be reacquainted with their tried and true tool of torture, the wooden #2 pencil with its pitifully pink eraser at the top! Do the memories of working with such substandard supplemental school supplies make you twitch whenever considering what to use on your next illustration? If so, I’ve got the cure for you! – 10 Awesome Drawing Tools They Never Gave You In School!

#1: Leadholder

Among pencil pushers, there are two decisive camps, the wood encase pencil sharpening traditionalist bastards and the button clicking affront to nature that are the mechanical pencil wielders of post Industrial Revolution disaster to come. Wooden pencils can be sharpened with a knife for custom line width allowing for expressive drawing and mechanical pencils having a consistent feed mechanism and uniform width with every inch of interchangeable lead refills making them practical for precision drawing… but… what if you could have a single tool with the advantages of BOTH! Have you ever wondered why they never bothered to make a mechanical pencil that uses ginourmas sticks of lead? It’s because they did, it’s called a leadholder, and its closest thing you’ll ever get to superior “ancient technology” outside of a cliché filled RPG.

Leadholders are a funny story; the earliest incarnation of the technology that used graphite is known to date at all the way back to 1567, almost as old as the discovery of graphite as a common drawing substance itself and actually predated encased pencils. Leadholders reportedly reached the peak of their popularity around the 1950′s, however, since then, the line of devices has massively declined in popularity to the point where very few people outside of art and drafting circles would know about them and are rarely found outside of art stores in this day and age.

Leadholders not only have the expression quality of traditional pencils, but also the convenience and ease of refill as a mechanical pencil. With Lead Pointer sharpeners, they are easy to uniformly sharpen to a point as well as use sandpaper for more custom tuning. Additionally, unlike most mechanical pencils that use a push mechanism, most leadholders use a clutch release system, so you can have as long a lead as you want in an instant. It is not entirely clear why such a versatile superior tool has declined in popularity over the years, but it’s definitely worth giving one a whirl should you come across one in your local art store. I personally use a leadholder for all my rough sketches, three of them with different lead types in fact! For more information, please visit www.leadholder.com. It’s ancient technology!

#2: Pencil Extender

Are you using a leadholder yet? If not then it’s all good, because if you were, this entry would be a lot less useful. Leadholders and Mechanical pencils with their metal or plastic bodies don’t get chopped to pieces when you sharpen them, wooden pencils on the other hand do and when the length of your pencil is less than the height of your hand, your drawing tends to go downhill real fast. That means it’s time for a new pencil, but what a waste, wouldn’t it be great if you could use that last remaining bit of pencil goodness just begging for sweet death?  That’s where the pencil extender comes in!

The pencil extender is exactly what it sounds like, a pencil like rod that you stick the withering husk of your previous pencil into for another round of torment – it’s just like beating a dead horse, but with significantly more practical results! In addition to standard wooden pencils, there are also other expendable pencil shaped drawing implements, specifically of the “Too expensive to waste” variety that a pencil extender will easily pay for itself on by extending their usability, such as graphite sticks and color erase pencils. Remember folks, if it still exists, use a pencil extender until it doesn’t!

#3: Mini Pencil

This one is more of a gimmick than actually useful, but it’s cute which in my book of ethics trumps everything else. Mini Pencils don’t actually have a recognizable formal name, they could be called “Micro Pencils”, “Tiny Pencils”, “Really Adorable Petite Pencils” and still pretty much describe what they are, yet it is a surprisingly rare item. However, for all of the drawing tools I’ve ever used, the Mini Pencil has been the one to receive the most attention by onlookers, perhaps due to the sight of using a ridiculously small pencil to draw with. To that extent, the mini pencil has one huge benefit; it’s really, really, small and portable like. Most will fit in your pocket, in your wallet, floating in mid air due to being too small to be affected by gravity, etc.

Mini pencils are light weight and effect the way you draw in general and is good training for arm and elbow control, especially if you’re a wrist oriented artist which I personally tend to be. Negative effects are that since your wrist tends to be closer to the drawing area of the paper, you will smudge more if you rest your wrist down frequently, but it’s cute, so I’ll call that a charming fault rather than you know, a fundamental flaw. A fundamental flaw unless that is, you intend to use the next tool on the list.

#4: Paper Stump

Speaking of smudging, here’s a tool that’s entire existence revolves around it. A more frugal artist might be happy with a paper tissue or even their fingers to spread the graphite happiness around, but for sheer smudging awesomeness, few can compare to the wonders of the paper stump. Being essentially a roll of super tightly bound paper in a pencil like shape of varying sizes, the paper stump excels at realistic graphite renderings and in the hands of a master can produce magic.

There is a sister of sorts to the paper stump called the Tortillon, not to be confused with the Tortilla or Tortellini, both which are considerably more edible. The Tortillon and the paper stump are very similar but produce different textures and generally have a different shape. Art stores tend to sell both at a considerable price given their actual material cost, so some artists opt to make their own out of rolled paper. Personally, I’m more of a clean and simple line art kind of guy, so in practice, I don’t use a paper stump much if at all, however, if you aim to create realistic renderings, in graphite or other medium adept at smudging, please give paper stumps a try!

#5: Kneaded Eraser

Along with the paper stump, the kneaded eraser is an absolute must have tool for person working in realistic graphite renderings! Made strangely more known to anime viewers thanks to Yuno-chan’s incident with one in Hidamari Sketch where she accidentally forgot her vinyl eraser for a test and was forced to use a kneaded erase, the kneaded eraser can be described as play-dough that erases stuff. Features include being moulded into a gigantic ball and thrown to stick on the ceiling. Features actually relevant to drawing are it allows for a softer, more flexible erasing edge useful for less abrasively removing graphite and with more control than a standard vinyl eraser.

You know those annoying eraser bits that get everywhere with vinyl erasers?  Kneaded erasers don’t have that problem, they simply absorb graphite and self clean when you massage them a lot, seriously. I’ve worked with kneaded erasers on total charcoal disasters where the eraser did an amazing job of cleaning itself after some vigorous squishing, although I wouldn’t say that they last forever though, you’ll probably want to replace one of those when it shares more in common with your black carpet than with a ball of clay. The weakness of kneaded erasers is the flip side of its strength, because it is softer and more flexible, it’s not particularly ideal for very focused erasing, specifically line art, for that you would be better off using a standard vinyl eraser or the next following tool!

Those who’ve known me for a longer time than I’m generally comfortable with know that I’m a long time The Sims fan and FAQ writer, better known as TheSocialBunny! Named after that trauma summoned man sized bunny that comes down to console sims who are very, very lonely in The Sims 2.

Recently, due to my disappointment regarding how The Sims 3 has mutated into a bloated bug infested nightmare it seemed like a natural idea to create a video series on ridiculously elaborate ways in which to make the lives of your sims as inhumanly miserable as possible in my very self explanatory video series “How to Play The Sims 3 VERY badly”… enjoy!

(Watch the full series on YouTube!)

Hoppy New Year 2011 Everyone! This year according to the Chinese Zodiac is the Year of the Rabbit, and you know what that means!… well, you might, but I’m pretty sure I don’t, haven’t checked my horoscope lately to be honest, but I drew this illustration of “Albino Snow Bunny Girl” Albi-chan! Albi-chan’s main motif are bunnies, rabbits, Japanese snow bunnies… and probably Japanese snow rabbits, hard to tell if you’re going to get all scientific about it. Speaking about science, here’s a scientifically sound diagram of a Snow Bunny based on what I learned about them from video games.

Albi-chan is not an official a story character, but she likes skiing, speaks with a Canadian accent and is very good at multiplying! Her favorite foods are carrots and happy thoughts. She becomes sad whenever she realizes her giant hands make it difficult to hold hot chocolate mugs. ^_^

Do you feel so tired after the holidays from the shopping, the partying and spending time with immediate family that you feel that you need another holiday just to recover? For when the holiday is more stressful than actually working, a pat on the back is well deserved! Congratulations on surviving the holidays, Merry After Christmas!

Perfect for those who don’t particularly fear the reaper, the Soulpiercer Dress is a light weight, combat ready attire catered to Gothic sensibilities and infused with good old fashion cowgirl hospitality, because heaven knows how often those demographics mix!Of course, it helps to be inherently demonic when slipping this silky bar dress on and getting your booze on, as the wing and tail holes will look mighty suspicious otherwise… as well as being drunk in general. Needless to say, this dress also helps if you are coming down with a fever… a fever for MORE COWBELL!

Also featured is an extremely child unfriendly combat sized fountain pen that is totally not filled with blood of freshly ground babies. We like to call this stick of misery the Soulpiercer Drawal, and it’s magic! Magic totally not filled with ground babies of course.

Well that’s it for the Xynthica Fashion Showcase 2010! Thank you all for taking the time to visit and view my work! Please have a Happy New Year and look forward to a brighter future!… hopefully naturally bright, the other known things to cause literally brighter days in human history are all kinds of lethal.

For when you want to commit horrendous atrocities against humanity in the name of one or more deities but without that claustrophobic feel those plate mail wearing sissies are always whining about, put your faith in the Crosslight dress!Sporting beautiful, breathable, bloodstain resistant fabrics, the Crosslight dress is designed with all of the comforts of the Dark Ages, yet forged with all of the genocide filled goodness that only futuristic warfare could bring!  It even comes with wing holes and a spiffy halo, because when delivering your daily dose of of righteous indignation, it never hurts to look the part!

Lightweight and with a shield generating core, the Crosslight dress is ideal for those times when you happen find yourself in the middle of a corpse strewn battlefield and suddenly remember you have the ability to fly, thus concluding that inflicting massive vertical laceration to everything in your immediate vicinity wasn’t particularly necessary, albeit still immensely satisfying. Making excuses to invade another nation on completely baseless grounds has never been more fun!

Next up, our local sensitive seductress Sylis sports the final dress soulfully! What will it be? Stick around to find out!