So the long-anticipated Apple iPad is finally here. It’s a device that’s sup­posed to take on net­books at their own game and win, pre­vent work­ing on the train or plane from being an ergonomic night­mare, and make Apple fanat­ics feel spe­cial again for own­ing one now the world has an iPhone. But it’s also a use­ful tool for design­ers, illus­tra­tors, and dig­i­tal artists look­ing to get cre­ative on the move.

Before we kick off, here’s a quick run­down of the what Apple has dished up. The Apple iPad is a slate PC that looks like a big iPhone. It has a home but­ton and an alu­minium bezel like a Mac­Book. The 9.7-inch touch­screen is made of glass. It’s only half an inch thick, and weighs about 1.5 pounds (about half a small­ish laptop).

It con­tains a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, which is both proces­sor and graph­ics. The Apple iPad will come with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of flash solid state stor­age. There’s 802.11n Wi-Fi for use at home and in cafes, Blue­tooth 2.1 for key­boards and other periph­er­als (there’s also a hard­ware key­board dock), and optional 3G for con­nec­tiv­ity on the move. You can run iPhone apps on it, as well as iPad-specific tools such as a cus­tom ver­sion of the iWork office suite—and down­load e-books like the iPhone’s capa­bil­i­ties for music and videos.

It costs between $499 and $829, though the 3G-capable mod­els are being sold with­out being tied to lengthy con­tracts. (Prices and con­tract details out­side the U.S. are not yet available.)

But what does it mean for artists?

1. It’s a dig­i­tal sketchpad.

Autodesk’s Sketch­book Mobile opened up the iPhone for artists to doo­dle in spare moments while wait­ing for trains, tubes, or mates in bars or elsewhere.

The iPhone has lim­ited touch sen­si­tiv­ity but its main prob­lem for this task is the small, low-resolution screen. The iPad is much larger and offers a res­o­lu­tion of 1024-by-768 pixel res­o­lu­tion at 132 pix­els per inch. It’s no mobile Wacom Cin­tiq though, as it’s unlikely to have a professional-level of touch sen­si­tiv­ity (I’m spec­u­lat­ing a bit here, though if it had, Apple would surely shout about it).

While Autodesk hasn’t announced an iPad spe­cific ver­sion of Sketch­book Mobile, the iPhone ver­sion will run on it. As part of the launch, Steve Jobs demon­strated the pop­u­lar Brushes app on the device.

2. It’s a portable portfolio.

Again, you can use your iPod to show off your port­fo­lio, using some­thing like Quark’s new I Love Design app. Again, screen size and res­o­lu­tion are issues, so the iPad will allow you to show off your work in all its glory. Inter­ac­tive design­ers should beware though, as with the iPhone oper­at­ing sys­tem, there’s no sup­port for Flash sites.

3. A new lease of life for design.

The nature of read­ing a news­pa­per, mag­a­zine, or book on a train means that you’ll appre­ci­ate the plea­sur­able lay­outs of print more than the strict seg­mented grids of Web­sites. Hope­fully, this means that pub­lish­ers will invest in design (and design­ers) for iPad ver­sions of news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines. Cre­at­ing dig­i­tal ver­sions of mag­a­zines won’t be as easy as tak­ing your print lay­out and export­ing an iPad ver­sion along with your press-ready PDFs—even at the iPad’s 1024-by-768 res­o­lu­tion, an A4 mag­a­zine page with 8-point body copy won’t be read­able. Whether this means more jobs for design­ers or cruddy repli­cated lay­outs depends on whether the inter­ac­tive mag­a­zine model takes off and pro­vides enough rev­enue to sup­port good design (as well as the whims of indi­vid­ual pub­lish­ing houses).

For inter­ac­tive design­ers, there’s hope that the iPad will enable more cre­ative use of inter­ac­tiv­ity. We’ve seen some incred­i­ble demos of what you can do with inter­ac­tive news­pa­pers and magazines—the best of which is Bonnier’s Mag+ —but these are so much more expen­sive to cre­ate than print mag­a­zines in terms of time and man­power. This will limit oppor­tu­ni­ties here to the biggest news­pa­per and mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers only.

As with the iPhone, where the iPad will cre­ate more work for inter­ac­tive design­ers is in cre­at­ing branded projects for clients. And with Flash CS5 slated to offer a sim­ple Out­put for iPhone/iPad export sys­tem, cre­at­ing apps could be sim­pler, quicker, and more suit­able for small projects than you’d expect.

4 “I’m on the train.”

Look­ing like a giant iPod, the iPad is ideal for recre­at­ing Dom Joly’s clas­sic “I’m on the train” sketch. Yeah, it’s a joke that’ll get tired quickly—all the more rea­son to get one quickly and get in first.

via Mac­world.

I just ran across this arti­cle on the web advo­cat­ing Car­toon­ist exer­cises. I have hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of legal pads, post it notes, and mis­cel­la­neous scraps of paper with car­toon­ing exer­cises on them. It’s a great way to stay sharp!

Check Out the Arti­cle Here

Last August, I had the won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to teach a fan­tas­tic group of kids. It reminded me just how much fun teach­ing and mak­ing art is for me. Easley First Bap­tist Church pro­vided a won­der­ful week-long sum­mer arts pro­gram for the chil­dren in our com­mu­nity. I vol­un­teered to teach car­toon­ing along­side an extremely tal­ented group of cre­ative peo­ple. These peo­ple came from many dif­fer­ent cre­ative dis­ci­plines, rang­ing from the visual arts, dance, music, and more.

In my class, stu­dents learned basic car­toon fig­ure draw­ing tech­niques and each child ended the course with a car­toon or comic book char­ac­ter that he/she designed. We all had loads of fun!

I am very excited that our church is plan­ning to offer the sum­mer arts pro­gram again this year in August on the 2^nd through the 5^th. So for all of you with ris­ing 2^nd-6^th grade kid­dos who are inter­ested in art be sure to sign-up!! If your child is inter­ested in tak­ing my car­toon­ing class, please sign up EARLY, as I am told my class filled up very quickly last year. We had a lot of fun!!