International Change Your ****ing Password Day - Illustration for MSNBC by Sam Spratt

It’s International Change Your Password Day so I sent off a quick illustration to MSNBC for dear friend and Queen of tech-journalism, Rosa Golijan. Read up on how easily crackable your current passwords are and how to toughen them up with an adamantium coating, courtesy of “Wabble: the ambiguously shaped drooling ball of blueness.” [MSNBC Article]

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Wacom Inkling MSNBC Review

For the MSNBC review, Rosa Golijan picked my brain for research and quotes on the new Wacom Inkling in order to get a well-rounded review from both a casual doodler’s perspective and that of a *straightens bow-tie* professional illustrator. In our opinion, it’s a magical device for beginner or pro that is highly recommended. Just a taste of what I had to say:

Let’s say I take my notebook and Inkling along on a subway ride and start sketching someone seated across from me. Since he might move around a lot, my first lightly drawn layer would consist of the basic shapes of his face. I don’t want to have all that messy preliminary work in the digital version of my sketch,  so I’ll tap the Inkling’s receiver to create a new layer in which I’ll begin refining the drawing. 

When I import my notebook contents to a computer, I’ll be able to look at the individual layers and throw out the ones with the messy initial work. The mistakes which will continue to exist on paper can disappear from the finalized digital version of my subway sketches in seconds.

As many of you know, I don’t care for sketchbooks because I like to work over my mistakes, not make several bad drawings before making a good one—the inkling is my solution.

Such features should be especially appealing to a new artist, but — as Spratt points out — they could ”serve as an affordable bridge between traditional and digital mediums for the pros who really like the feel of pen on paper yet crave the flexibility of digitized drawings”

Click on through for the full, in-depth REVIEW