I downloaded Brushes for the iDevice a couple weeks ago and finally started really playing hard with it yesterday. It’s a fairly simple application. It’s got three brush types with a wide range of sizes, a fill tool, a color picker that can also set transparency, and an eyedropper, and it can zoom in on your work by up to 800%. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a maniacally elegant design that’s enough to put together some really nice drawings. Plus, the simplicity probably has a lot to do with how responsive the program is, which it is very. I came up with these two drawings (click to enlarge):

The neatest thing about the app is the way it records all of your brush strokes as you go along. This allows it to provide two very cool features in a free companion desktop app (OS X only, I’m afraid). First, you can play back the entire process of creating your drawing, and then export it to QuickTime. Here’s the video for the drawing of Burrito Boy above:

Second, the desktop app can export HUGE versions of your drawings. The final image that’s stored on your iPhone is only the resolution of the screen (320 x 480), so you’d think that blowing the drawing up to 1920 x2880, but what results is actually really clean and just looks like it was painted with a thick brush. I’m pretty sure it does this by simply playing back your brush strokes onto a much larger canvas. Pretty genius. Here’s a humongulous version of the same Burrito Boy (click to enlarge, a lot):

If you’re the drawing type and you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s definitely worth the measley $4.99 Brushes costs to try it out. It’s a great way to pass the time at work.

There’s a similar app called Colors! that I may also try out. For me, the real draw with that one is that it can upload and share your drawings on their online gallery, which also includes drawings from the DS version of the application. The gallery even boasts the same playback feature that Brushes’ desktop app has, without you having to go through the rigmarole of uploading a Quicktime video to YouTube.

I really dig the way developers keep finding ways to make my iPhone more indispensable.

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Are you having trouble staying motivated in a sea of excuses? Do you constantly procrastinate? Do you find yourself sacrificing your dreams to keep up with the endless minutea of modern life? Then try my brand new, patented “Tough Shit! Do It Anyway!” method!

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I left the webcomics world a year ago today. I still don’t quite know how I feel about it.

The TMABB site is still there, still showing the goodbye entry, still advertising the book that people finally stopped buying a few months after the end. I don’t load the site very often, but it’s never easy when I do. I miss it, even despite how much I hated working on it half of the time. It’s sort of the way you miss an ex.

The whole thing is still incredibly disappointing for me. Webcomics has always been a pretty tight community, and I guess I just really wanted to be a part of it, to be known. Part of me still does. Tee-mab was simply not succeeding, though, despite my best efforts.

I was trying! Really! But two years of giving it a solid go without seeing any significant growth in audience? If it was going to succeed, it would have after the first year. I stuck it out longer than I should have, though, because I wanted to be really sure that things weren’t going to turn around. And they didn’t. I mean, okay, at least I broke even on the book, but I only printed 15 copies. So I quit.

The good news is, my life has gotten a lot better in the last year. My weekly routine is now basically free of stress. I’m making real progress on my current big project, after having stalled on Ultimate Epic Conflict Advance!. My fiancee and I have managed to build a homebrewing blog that pays for more than its share of my Dreamhost account. I have a fiancee. So things are totally better now. Quitting proved to be the right decision.

There’s just still a lot of guilt. I still have the story in my head, but it looks like it’s never going to get finished. I hate that. It’s a really good story, I swear. I’ve told it to a select few people and they seemed to like it. We were about six months away from the most awesome-sauce plot twist ever when I quit. You’d've loved it. You would’ve crapped your pants and it would have smelled like feces.

Maybe I should have quit sooner. If I had realized the strip was failing before I used up all of my energy on it, I would have had it in me to at least close out the story.

I hope I can revisit TMABB some day, give it a full blown do-over from square one. For now, though, I have more potentially lucrative projects that I want to give my attention to.

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