Category: Computer

Sidecar, Screen Mirroring

sidecar screen mirroring
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.

I’ve been struggling to use the mouse as a brush or an eraser in Photoshop on my iMac Retina with any accuracy but I’d forgotten how to set up Sidecar – the facility that enables you to use an iPad as a second screen for your Mac.

For screen mirroring, this is how it works:

  • In Systems Preferences on the iMac go to ‘Displays’
  • Click ‘Add Display’
  • Select ‘iPad’ and ‘Mirror and extend’

At this stage the screen on my iMac transforms itself to fit the narrower proportions of the iPad and the whole set up works as I’d expect it to: I can use the Mac’s mouse pretty much as normal and I can use the Apple Pencil on the iPad for the brush or eraser in Photoshop.

Note: Mac and iPad are connected to the same wifi network. In the settings the iPad ‘Handoff’ is enabled.

Unfortunately working in Sidecar doesn’t improve my drawing skills!

Onions

Drawing some of our onions with the new Manga vector mapping pen in Adobe Fresco, using an Apple Pencil, iPad Pro and a sketchboard pro drawing board.

onions

Growing through a dry summer and a heatwave, this year’s onions were smaller than the previous year’s – when we had a wetter summer – but they’ve kept better. One hazard last year was that the local foxes liked to pull up a few of the almost tennis ball-sized onions and stash them under the hedge. Thanks to damage by foxes and a wet spell before we lifted them, many of the onions went soft.

drawing onions
Drawing on the iPad Pro on the Sketchboard Pro drawing board
onions

Fontself

A rainy afternoon and I had an update from Fontself, so decided to give it another try. New features include an easy way to fill in outlines and to draw perfect vector shapes. I’ve gone for my usual wobbly style, although I did try out the method for drawing smooth shapes on the ‘C’.

Fontself alphabet

On previous occasions I’d used Fontself to make fonts from alphabets I’d drawn on paper or in Adobe Illustrator. It’s a whole lot simpler drawing in the Fontself app on the iPad.

Look forward to experimenting with it a bit more, now that I’ve got into the way it works.

Dell Studio xps

Dell Studio xps

Until a few months ago I was falling back on my old PC, a Dell studio xps, to print some of my booklets but it finally failed to start and since then I’ve steadily reformatted my publications onto InDesign on my iMac.

Around Old Horbury

Around Old Horbury

When I first published Around Old Horbury in 1998 to launch at part of an exhibition at Horbury Library I borrowed a laser printer to print the pages in black and white but went for a colour cover using my own ink jet printer. I got the cover laminated and included a flip out town trail map.

title page, 1998

That first edition would have been designed in Microsoft Publisher. That’s given me some problems as I was never able to get Publisher working on my iMac, even if I ran a virtual version of Windows 10 on the Mac using the Parallels program.

Title page 2022

So I’m now revamping the booklet as an Adobe InDesign publication on the iMac. It’s an opportunity to simplify the typography, so I’m using just one typeface, Dolly Pro, for all the text and headings. The colour cover will stay the same, as I’ve had that printed and laminated professionally.

Junction Box

junction box

I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.

cruet

So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.

The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.

Fontself

drawing a typeface

The Fontself font creation program enables you to draw and scan a font or to draw each letter on the iPad as a vector image.

my first fontself font

What I’d like to do is draw the font on paper and then convert it to a vector font, as bitmap fonts are rather limited compared to regular fonts.

bitmap font creation

So far, I either end up with a bitmap font or an error message informing me that my particular version of vector image isn’t acceptable to Fontself.

vectorised image
Vectorised photograph, reduced to 26 colours in Adobe Illustrator for iPad

I’m sure that I’ll work it out and in the process I’m learning a bit about Adobe Illustrator, such as how to vectorise an image using ‘vectorize’ on the iPad version or ‘Image Trace’ on the Mac.

Link

Fontself

Adobe Illustrator

Figures

figures

I’m practising using the 3D drawing figure in Clip Studio Paint – a kind of virtual lay figure – keeping to the standard body shape but developing the character through its actions and costume. I’m going for a limited range of tones because it’s the form of the character that I’m interested in, but I look forward to adding colour, which I can do later on another layer, over the tonal layer but beneath the line drawing.