Tip: OS X Window Switching Keyboard Shortcuts for Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign)

Here are some super handy keyboard shortcuts for switching between open document windows when working within the Adobe Creative Suite applications (Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign). These are Macintosh-only keyboard shortcuts since I do not have access to a Windows machine. Sure to increase your productivity.

  • Illustrator: Command (Apple) + ~ (that’s the “tilde” key, to the left of the numeral one, otherwise known as “the little squiggly line thing”)
  • InDesign: same as Illustrator
  • Photoshop: Control + Tab

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Photoshop Tip: Resize A Marquee Selection

Photoshop Transform Selection ScreenshotSo you’ve just made a selection in Photoshop using the Marquee tool, but you didn’t start in the right place and one of the corners isn’t covering part of the area you want selected.

Yeah, you could try to place your cursor oh-so-perfectly right near the area in question and try to drag another rectangular marquee selection (using the Shift key of course to add to an existing selection). But why doesn’t Photoshop just give you interactive resize handles for the selection?

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Tip: Keyboard Shortcut To Fill A Photoshop Layer (Or Selection) With The Background or Foreground Color

Photoshop tool palette color swatchesEver just want to fill a selection or layer with the background or foreground color in Photoshop? Forget heading all the way over to the palette to choose the Paintbucket tool – just press Command (Apple key)+Delete for the foreground color, or Option+Delete for the background color (Alt+Backspace and Control+Backspace on Windows).

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Sexy Cartoon School Girl Pin-Up – now avaialble at MyPSPTubes.com

Sexy cartoon schoolgirl pinup illustration

A new sexy cartoon school girl pinup has recently been added to my slowly growing collection over at MyPSPTubes*. This one was fun to work on. I wanted to play on the classic fighter plane nose cone art where the girls were straddling a plane (or a bomb!). I thought the number two pencil was perfect. She was given glasses at one point for that sexy librarian look we all love, but it just didn’t work with the overall design. Continue reading

Illustrator tip: Preserving transparency & effects on the clipboard (using copy/paste)

Ever find that you are trying to copy & paste ( or drag & drop) vector art from one Illustrator file to another, only to find all your transparency and other Appearance effects gone? I have to Google this every time it happens, so I thought I would make a post for it so I can look it up for myself, and help a few others along the way. Of course remembering this would be helpful, but I can’t count on that! Continue reading

Odd Rods style scooter hot rod cartoon art at The Scooter Scoop

Odd Rods inspired scooter hot rod cartoon art
Hot-rod scooter cartoon mascot character.

Steve over at The Scooter Scoop commissioned me a few months back to create an original Odd Rods inspired cartoon illustration for his blog. He’s posted a kudo-laden entry about the Odd Rods style scooter monster hot rod cartoon art I did for him, and I appreciate it very much. Just wanted to return the favor and give Steve and The Scooter Scoop a little press.The “Mod Rod” cartoon art is available at CafĂ© Press as well.

Thanks Steve!

Wacom Tablet: Scroll Click

Wacom Intuos3 6X11 Pen Tablet

Wacom has just updated their graphics tablet driver software for Macintosh and the release notes PDF tells us that a new feature has been introduced, “Scroll Click” (my nickname for it). This is an awesome new feature that allows the user to set a pen button to the “scroll click”, and then when pressing that button, you can drag the pen on the tablet to activate scrolling. In addition to this being very cool, it’s a feature that I suggested to the tech & PR departments a few weeks ago, I can’t help but assume this was implemented due to that request. I was initially given a not-so-encouraging response, basically because the Intuos line of tablets has the Touch Strips srcoll/zoom hardware touch-sensitive areas. Of course, their other tablets do not have these.

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Wacom Intuos3 Graphics Tablet Review for Cartoonists & Illustrators

***Update: See my review of the Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet ***

I have been holding off on writing up a review of the Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet until I had a chance to work with them for some time and really get a feel for real-world usage, particularly for cartoonists & illustrators. Oddly enough I had a hard time finding an in-depth review specifically geared towards artists that draw. There were some big questions that needed to be answered, most importantly that of how the Wacom tablets worked with Adobe Illustrator.

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