Episode 4 Commentary – On the Road

The really hard part about making something that needs to be written, drawn, colored and scripted every week is that I don’t get much time off.  Even when I travel, I need to keep working on Petra’s Call.

my desk

I’ve got a pretty solid routine and a great set-up at home. I sit down every morning at 5AM (yes, you heard correctly) in front of my Cintiq and I work for 2 hours and then pick up additional work sometimes in the evenings.  With the Cintiq I get to draw right on the screen – it’s great, I love it to bits.

But when I hit the road, I have to leave the Cintiq at home and swap out to a Wacom Intuos.  The tablets are about the same size as my 15″ Macbook Pro, so it all packs up quite nicely.   Working with the Intuos on the road was proving to be a bit slower than my Cintiq, which was frustrating.

I eventually figured out that it wasn’t the tablet that was slowing me down but it was the hot keys, always reaching up to my laptop keyboard took me out of the zone. Now my tiny little bluetooth Apple keyboard hits the road with me. It might seem like overkill, but Photoshop hotkeys are my best friend.

The other key to hitting the road with a webcomic is actually accessing the web. Hotels love to charge you $15/day for Internet access from your room, which, honestly, is quite insane, but thanks to iPhone 3.0, that won’t be a problem anymore (at least not when I’m in Canada).

I have recently set up tethering on my iPhone and I couldn’t be happier. After 20 seconds of set-up, I’ve got my laptop online through my iPhone’s connection and I’m ready to upload episodes, hit the forums or do anything else online that I can’t do on the iPhone itself – such as look at Flash sites (Quick aside: Seriously Apple – my 4 year old N73 can run Flash – you and Adobe need to get it together and get Flash on the iPhone)
Road Kit

All I need to take my art studio on the road is a little shoulder bag, 1 tiny laptop, 1 tiny tablet, 1 tiny keyboard, an iPhone and two battery chargers and I’m set.

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