I decided to put Comicado on Steam Greenlight. Ok, Steam is mostly gaming oriented but it certainly can‘t hurt to have it there. Of course, even better would be if the application would be actually accepted, so if you want to support Comicado, please visit the following link and give it your vote:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143404975

The new version of Comicado improves performance , solves some memory problems and brings a new feature – line constraints. It also fixes few nasty (= crashing) bugs which got sneaked into the previous version.

Users of previous versions will probably notice a new layer preview method. The blinking effect used before has some serious technical problems and it was really nothing worth keeping from the usability point of view. The new method with a temporary, big thumbnail image works a lot better. Another thing which seriously needed improvements were the color adjustment tools. Comicado is no speed champion but these tools were really slow beyond the level of acceptance. I am happy to say they works much faster now. With some other technical improvements Comicado should be generally faster and more stable now.

The new thing are line constraints – you can now draw straight lines (or splines) in fixed directions. There are three kinds of constraints – ruler, angle and perspective. Yeap – no longer need to trace that perspective grid lines – now Comicado does that for you .

Comicado 0.97 has been released! The biggest new feature are the hi-res layers which allow drawing black line art in double resolution. As you may be aware, printing b&w line bitmaps is usually done in higher resolutions then printing color images. While you can turn, let say 450dpi, antialiased line art into 1200dpi bitmap quite well, it is obvious that any higher resolution will provide even better final b&w bitmap. This concept of having different resolutions in one working image has been already seen in Manga Studio and provides more efficient way of handling higher resolutions for the line art.

This release features also some other changes – the full list can be seen here: http://jugilus.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13.

…I am happy to say that my illustration tool called Comicado is now out! If you are a comic artist or a digital illustator then I invite you to try it out!

I am working to get Comicado ready for release. Not sure when that will happen but we sure are getting closer with every passing day.

Comicado? Well that is the new name of my graphic application as the old one wasn’t really an ear-catcher. Luckily, the name is not the only thing which progressed since the last post. The application has now implemented all features planned for the first version! It’s still not ready to be released but it’s now in the final stage of the development. Some issues still need to be resolved and some things polished, but the application is in the usable shape.

Comicado has some cool unique features but, ultimately, the most important aspect of any art application is how good is at drawing and painting. There are many things which affects the painting experience: layers system, brush tools, tools for filling, selections and more. All these elements are something most artists expects to have in their graphic tool and Comicado has a good share of them. Maybe the most important component is the brush engine as it directly affects the look of artwork. Comicado has a brush engine which could be described as more  ”classic”. It is more similar to “Photoshop” or PaintTool SAI than Painter or Art Rage. I know I am biased but the truth is that I am really happy with it. I had no problem switching from SAI to Comicado when drawing and we know what kind of reputation SAI has when it comes to digital drawing.

Here is some work I did in Comicado:

I can’t say when Comicado will get released. Beside getting the application ready, I must also write a manual, do some samples, web site stuff etc. Hopefully it won’t take (too) long.