Wow, day 11, that’s over a third of the way through. Social media seems awash with Inktoberists, as is the real life Inktober wall up in the litho workshop.
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I also managed to try a bit of digital inking with the new SHARP touchscreens we’ve got down at Grand Parade. They have an overlay which works as a whiteboard, but also allow a different approach to drawing with tools like photoshop. I’ll try and record a demo. I did manage to catch Duncan trying out the pens.
I’ve been getting my inktober images into the blog with my iPhone camera.
My iPhone takes a picture that’s about 2.3Mb in size, and 4032×3024 pixels.
The screen on my iPhone however is only 1334×750 pixels so the image is much bigger than the screen, which is great as it allows images to be cropped without losing quality. However a 2.3Mb image will download slowly and use up a fair bit of bandwidth so If you are sharing images on the web it makes sense to keep them to a reasonable size.
A reasonable size for images most web pages is about 1000 pixels wide, and about 150-200Kb.
So how do you make the file smaller. Some services will do this automatically, Instagram for example reduces uploads to 1000x1000pixels. But if you want to reduce the size of an image it’s super easy.
On a mac you just double click the image to open it in Preview.
Select Tools>Adjust Size, and then set it to somewhere around 1000 pixels width. With the scale proportionally selected the image with keep the original aspect ratio.
Once done Export, and add a little compression, around 60% is a good starting point.
Today I’m going to have a chat with the UoB Level 4 Illustrators about using studentcentral, and will give Inktober a plug. Hopefully next week we’ll have a few more students joining the fray.
This weekend I’m also going to try and add a couple of short videos on image sizing, compression and file formats for the web, as it’ll be useful not just for Inktober but for reducing the sizes of assignments to squeeze into Turnitin.
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Some folk are feeling a bit shy about posting in public, so the semi public wall gives folk a chance to join in the challenge without getting nervous. Scarlett Tierney is looking after the wall, and the folks, and joining in the inktober activity over on the twitter:
Duncan Bullen is the Deputy Head of the School of Art with a responsibility for Research and Enterprise, and one of the keenest supporters of the School of Art attempting the Inktober challenge.
He is also ridiculously busy, so I’m posting his first three days pictures on his behalf.
I went to buy some replacement pens from the Uni shop and when I went to use them realised I’d bought Graphic 2(mm), and Graphic 3(mm) Pigma pens, which I didn’t even know existed, and despite a little sigh on my part turn out to be just as good as the Graphic 1 pens.
I’ve refilled one of my Copic Ciao pens, and managed not to pour black ink all over my hands, so that’s progress.
We now have nine University of Brighton Inktoberists, and probably more… Sarah Ison our Information Advisor at City Campus does a lot of drawn journals anyway, so I’m sure she’ll last the distance… here’s her day 1 pic:
I’ve had a go at the Inktober challenge a couple of times, and it’s not as easy as it seems. By about day 15 I’m usually running on empty and looking for excuses, so here are three ways to beat the procrastination.
Having a theme for the month helps. Last year I alternated between monsters and soldiers, and added the latest inked work to the previous work to build a collage of the month’s work.
