At the hundredth meridian...where the great plains begin.

I finally managed to put together a cover for my project...and here it is. (It's since been pointed out to me that power lines are usually only on the right side of the road, not both sides. Oops. Call it artistic license, I guess!) My Canadian readers will no doubt remember that "At The Hundredth Meridian" is the title of an old Tragically Hip song. As hipmuseum.com explains, “The one hundredth meridian is the line of longitude that separates much of Western Canada from the Central and Atlantic regions. The line also serves as a division between the moist and urban east and the arid and rural west. It has also come to provide a convenient political dividing line (sort of the Canadian equivalent to those familiar Blue and Red States) between the liberal leaning east and conservative leaning west."

Hockey and the Canadian landscape are the two most common topics of Tragically Hip songs, which probably explains why they aren't very popular anywhere else.

For my non-Canadian readers, here's the song so you can understand what on earth I'm talking about. Isn't Youtube great?! I've always really liked this video, it has some interesting imagery and it's rather exquisitely photographed.

March.
And April. I don't really like how these turned out, but I sort of ran out of time to do better ones. :X

I spent some time over the summer creating my own Photoshop brushes, and used those to colour my book cover. Here's an example of a page of brush marks that I scanned in and made into Photoshop brushes:

In my earlier posts (check the archives for November 2009) you can see how I tried using these to colour the interior pages as well. Unfortunately I didn't really like how those were turning out and was told that my ink drawings were strong enough on their own anyway.

I have never been able to simulate hand-drawn textures in Photoshop, yet there are countless digital painters who can do so with ease. It's very frustrating. I think it is time I invest in a new graphics tablet, as my Wacom is old and quite low-end: it measures 4 x 6" and it has no tilt sensitivity. In fact, until yesterday I wasn't even aware that tablets other than Cintiq tablet PCs came with tilt sensitivity!

Perhaps I should resign myself to the fact that digital painting just isn't for me, and continue colouring by hand...