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Sept. 9, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
43:55
Episode 214 Scott Adams: Drawing Dilbert While Testing Camera Setup
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Time Text
Well, let's see if this works.
Thanks.
Thank you.
This works.
Now, in theory, you should be seeing...
Oh, there I am.
Yeah, you should be seeing my drawing surface.
And then if I change the camera, you should be seeing me.
Let's try that.
With any luck, now you're seeing me.
I've figured out how to change the lighting exposure since the last time I failed to do this.
With any luck, the sound will be perfect every time.
Let's check out my mixer.
My mixer says I should be taking Whoops.
Taking sound from the wrong place, I think.
I think I'm getting sound from the right place.
Sorry if you're trying to hang with this, but I thought I would just show you what it looks like when I'm drawing.
So what you see is the bare bones of a comic that I already started, and what I'm doing is doing the finished artwork on top of the first draft.
So if I make any mistakes, it's easy to correct here.
That would be the back of the boss's head. - Okay.
I like to make the drawing as big as possible when I'm working on it.
Because that hides the errors when you shrink it down.
It's also easier on my hand.
So if you ever wondered how I spend my weekend mornings, you're looking at it.
This is pretty much every Saturday and Sunday morning for about 30 years.
Except I was using paper for most of that time.
So here's Dilbert.
And for those of you just joining me, I am drawing over the artwork that I did in rough.
No pinky twitch, that's correct.
So I'm wearing this glove-like item that's really just something I learned from somebody else.
So it keeps my hand from getting my hand oils on stuff.
So I'm going to change the pen size to 10.
That's what it looks like.
When did you first go electronic?
I think it was 2004-ish.
This is a, the device is a Wacom Cintiq, C-I-N-T-I-Q.
Now when I'm done, I'm going to remove the layer that has the rough draft.
So all you'll see in the end is the finished art.
You can probably tell that the difference between the rough art and the finished art is very low.
Yeah, this is Sling Studio.
Let me show you. How old is it?
How old is the computer monitor?
This model is probably a year old, two years maybe.
This is the Studio console and I've got different cameras set up so if I Drag this in.
You should switch to this camera.
And if I want to switch you back to look at my drawing board, back to there.
I think I've got the sound and the lighting and the multi-cameras worked out.
I'm gonna start doing some interviews with folks over Skype and over my own company's app called Interface.
It's called Interface by WenHub and lets any expert charge for their time with a video call.
Now what I'm doing right now would have been impossible without human help.
That's why the interface app by WenHub that my startup does is going to change the world because there's so many things that you just can't do without 15 minutes of getting somebody's help.
And that's about all it took.
Bob Ross on steroids.
Interview Elon Musk.
I'd love to. Yeah, a number of you apparently are listening to my John Dvorak interview.
He interviewed me. He came to the house a few days ago.
And I guess that's out on his No Agenda podcast right now.
He asked me all the good questions.
Alright.
What's it like to be a cartoonist?
It's a lot like this.
Little motion.
motion indications.
If you're trying to become a cartoonist, my advice for you is to practice drawing hands.
If you can draw a hand, you can draw anything.
Hands are really hard to draw.
If you can't draw a hand, you probably can't be much of a cartoonist.
So work on your hands.
Do I ever recycle panels?
I don't.
I've never recycled a full panel, but obviously the characters are often drawn in the same.
They're drawn in the same poses because there aren't that many things that these characters can do.
They sit at tables, they drink coffee, they walk around.
They don't do much.
They're mostly talking.
What are the hardest things to draw, you might ask?
Hardest things to draw are anything that is supposed to be even, like a nose or glasses.
Getting any kind of symmetry is always tough.
Yeah, a lot of people draw three fingers instead of four, but they're lazy.
I'm a full four-fingered cartoonist.
No horses. No tie for Dilbert?
Yeah, I got rid of Dilbert's tie.
A lot of people haven't noticed, but he hasn't had a tie for years.
They're all casual.
Part of the trick of drawing is to pick the right time of day.
Because my hand is jumpy if I've had too much coffee.
Or if I'm distracted.
But if I've exercised and I'm kind of sleepy, my hand works perfectly.
Will Calvin ever come back?
I doubt it. Somebody says the pointy-eared boss is Trump.
Well, you know, I feel bad with that anonymous mole inside the White House who was complaining about his boss, who was Trump, because it means that I've failed a generation.
It has to be somebody younger who is not a Dilbert reader, because anybody who's been reading Dilbert would recognize that the complaints they made about their boss are the complaints that every underling makes about their boss.
Did you ever wonder how hard it is or how easy it is to draw?
You're seeing the easy part where I'm just essentially following my own lines.
Which, by the way, is not as easy as it looks.
If you think it's easy to trace your own drawing, it's not.
It takes a lot of practice.
How did I maintain ownership in...
It's just contractual.
You just have to have lawyers.
When you first get syndicated, when you make your first deal, usually you're splitting the licensing 50-50.
Let's increase the weight of that line to a 12.
Yeah, the first thing you do when you get syndicated, meaning you get your big contract to be a cartoonist, or before you sign the meaning you get your big contract to be a cartoonist, or before you sign the So any questions about how do you keep your rights, how do you copyright, how do you trademark, the answer is all the same.
Get a lawyer. How can you convince your daughter to vote Republican?
Well, good luck with that. Unlike Bob Ross, but less weird.
How did Bob Ross become so darn famous after death?
There was just something about that guy that was downright weird.
In a good way. I spent a lot of hours watching Bob Ross draw.
So here's the hardest thing to do.
is to draw anything that's got any kind of symmetry close enough.
You'll never notice that that's not perfect when it's small.
Here we go.
He was a marine drill sergeant, Bob Ross was.
Bob Ross smoked dope.
Well, there's a shock.
What are the odds?
An artist who did marijuana So if you were watching me draw the original art,
instead of just tracing the lines, you would see a lot more, it would look more like programming than art, because you'd be continually changing the settings, the line weight, changing which tool you have, you know, copying and pasting, that sort of thing.
So the art of drawing is a lot closer to programming.
Than it used to be.
So it used to be that drawing was nothing but drawing.
But now you've got to hit your settings, your line weight, your layers, your all kinds of options.
So it's halfway between computing and art.
One of the tough things about drawing is drawing things that look wrong, but are right.
Like this hand that's curled under this hand.
If you were trying to figure out how to draw that, you never would have wanted to be happy with that because it just doesn't look like a hand.
But when you see it in context, it is.
So it takes a long time to learn how to draw something that looks wrong, but the viewer will see as right.
That was sloppy.
His hand looks like a spatula.
He's a little bit more.
There's about a 10 second delay between what you're seeing up here and what you're seeing here.
Yeah. Seems like you're just tracing.
Yeah, so this last step is essentially just tracing because I've already done the drawing.
You can see the bigger comic here.
So the drawing's already done, but I do it in a layer, and it's just sloppy, and then I go over it a little bit cleaner.
So you can see, for example, that there are some stray lines and stuff and some errors that I don't keep when I do the final.
All right, this is probably a line weight of 10.
So depending on the size of the characters, I change the line weight.
smaller characters get daintier lines.
This is actually, you're watching actually the best part of my job.
Okay.
Oddly enough. Can't the computer do the tracing?
It can't because it's not an exact trace.
What you're seeing is some Rough art that's pretty clean, so it looks to you like all I'm doing is tracing, but it's more typical that the rough art would not be exact and that the first time it would look the way it's supposed to look is when I do the final over top of it and just use it as a guideline.
But you are seeing artwork that's unusually close to the finished, so that's a little misleading.
So I'm probably only improving it by 10% by doing the final art.
The rough art was also digital.
So let me show you how that works.
So when I first drew it, Here you're seeing two layers.
You're seeing the rough art juxtaposed to the original art.
So I don't know how clearly you can see it, but you can see that there is some difference between the rough art and the original.
So here's one that's just rough.
So the way it was drawn.
I took a template of his head and plopped it in there, gave him a different expression, drew his body originally, and you can see that these are just sketch lines.
It's hard to see just how much of a sketch this is.
Let's see, that might help a little bit.
But you can see that these are rough lines, and then when I do the final So that's just the rough.
And then what I do is I take this layer and I lower its temperature, if you will, until it's something like that.
And then when I draw over it on another layer, it looks like tracing.
but I don't want to keep that line, so I'll take it away.
You had dog bird on your organic chem notebook.
Well, I'm glad that helped.
I'm sure you got an A. So Macintosh is the computer, but the screen is from a company called Wacom, W-A-C-O-M. And that gives you the screen that you can draw on.
You might know that this monitor you're looking at is an iPad Pro, and it also comes with its own stylus.
I could do art on the iPad, but it doesn't have the features, it doesn't have the size, it doesn't have the multiple windows and all the things that you need to be efficient.
So while you could use the iPad to draw, this is more of a toy, whereas the Wacom is a professional tool.
There's an enormous difference.
Ha ha. You should check out Wenhub.
Yes, you should. You're going to hear a lot more about my startup Wenhub that allows you to...
Oh, I can show you.
I can show you what it does.
Let me show you. Let's see.
the WinHub interface.
So here's what it does, if you can see this.
It says, find an expert or be an expert.
If you want to be an expert, it's as easy as just putting in the keywords that you're an expert on and saying whether you want to be paid in our internal WEN tokens that can be exchanged for cash on exchanges.
We're in dollars. The advantage of dollars is that it's instant and there's no fluctuation, but there's a 20% taken out of that for the bank and for us, whereas the tokens, the only cost would be if you exchange them on the exchange.
So that'd be less than 1% friction on that, whereas the dollars have 20% for profit and for banking fees.
So if you want to find an expert, It's this easy.
You just put in your keyword and then you just swipe through and say, oh, here's an expert, here's an expert, here's an expert.
And if I were to click on one of these people, I would be connected to a video call and I would be paying, in this case, The equivalent of $20 per hour, but I might only want 15 minutes of assistance, so I'd only pay a quarter of the hourly rate in this case.
So imagine all the uses for that.
Imagine just people who need you to keep them company, people who need a counselor, people who have PTSD and just want to talk to somebody else who does, people who are Trying to become cartoonists and want to know what equipment to use.
People who want to set up a sling studio, which is what you're watching right now.
The equipment I'm using is a sling studio.
So I've got multiple cameras going for those just joining.
Sold. Let me change my camera angle so you can see it working in real time.
So that's moving to another camera.
And I'm going to go back to the drawing board.
And you should see that in a moment.
So learning how to set up this setup, it was, I think, literally impossible.
Without talking to another human who had done it, who knew how to do this sort of thing.
and luckily I did.
All right that's a bad looking line there.
And let's say you want to split screen and see me drawing at the same time you see me from the other angle.
You create a split screen, save it, and then move it down there.
And the disadvantage with this is, I'll move this back in a minute, but the disadvantage is that I think the comments will cover up me, I think.
Let's check how that looks in Periscope.
Thank you.
Wait a minute.
Why is Periscope only giving me one look?
Looks like Periscope is not working. - Let's try this.
That should be working.
And let me check comments.
Sound is good?
Is the sound of the stylus fake noise?
It is not.
You think the sound of the stylus is fake?
No.
But I'm surprised you could hear it.
I look jaundiced.
You can hear it, but you can't see the video, right?
Three disconnects. .
So you can actually hear the stylus.
That's funny. Can you tell me if you can see me moving?
It's not frozen.
That's funny because it's frozen on my own device.
How about that?
I have to reboot my own device.
All right.
Let's finish up this drawing.
Let's put a date on it.
And you're wondering, when will this appear?
This one will appear on...
Let's see.
This one will run in newspapers and online on 10-21.
18. One of the weird skills you learn as a cartoonist is writing in the wrong direction.
So now I'm just looking for any lines I might have missed.
So let's take a look at this cartoon.
I need someone to run some test scripts on the new software.
I could do that. My project is on hold until the new hardware arrives.
Great, I'll need you to run the same tests on every version until the final release.
And Dilber says, um, I was only volunteering to do it once.
It isn't my job to do all the testing.
Too late. You're the test script guy now.
You're adding an entirely new job to my existing job.
Don't you want to be a team player?
Of course I do. Good, I just put you on the losing team.
I make fun of team players a lot.
Alright, I'm going to save that.
Now you probably wonder, how do I add the color to this?
I'm going to change the camera for a moment.
That's just so you don't see my computer screen when I'm fussing with this.
So what I'm going to do now is save this with a different file name.
Dilbert volunteers.
So I save one of them in black and white.
And then this next one is going to be the actual one I colorize.
and And then I'll show you my screen in a minute.
I just didn't want you to see my whatever else I got going on here.
I know this part isn't interesting, but I'll be back to my screen in a moment.
count.
So I'm gonna find my color.
All right, there it is.
So I've got some standard colors that I have in the separate file, and I just wanted to get that going.
Alright, coming back.
Now, I've prepped this file and saved it.
Then I'm going to change its type.
First I'm going to get rid of all the words.
So I'm getting rid of the text.
I'll show you why later.
But for now I'm just going to colorize this thing.
It's currently grayscale.
I'm gonna temporarily change it to bitmap that flattens it.
And then I'm gonna change it back to grayscale, and then I'm gonna change it from there back to CMYK. All right, and then I'm gonna use this little bucket.
To colorize these cats.
See if you're still with me.
Anybody still here?
Don't see many comments.
All right, but the way it works is now I can just touch the zones that I want to be this color.
And you're watching a process that used to take a long time.
And now I literally just tap the areas that are gonna be the same color.
Why don't I have more people of color in my cartoon, you're asking?
They all seem to be these pale Caucasians.
And the answer is, because all of my characters are flawed, It's a dicey proposition for me to do somebody who's a different ethnicity and build into the character any fun flaws.
Because if I do that, I look like the guy who thinks, hey, are you saying all Elbonians are dumb or lazy or whatever flaw I build into them?
And the answer is, no, I'm just saying this character is.
But you can't get away with that in this world.
In this world we live in, Nobody can take a joke.
Or at least one-third of the world can't.
Then... Whoops.
That's wrong. I think that's right.
I'm going to check my colors here.
Oh, man, man, man, man.
What the hell was that all about?
Have that color in it.
Grab that.
Grab that.
Don't forget the little areas.
I tend to do these in whatever order I feel like, which is not very organized.
Just...
But it requires less thinking.
And I can use my thinking for things I care about.
The reason I do all the same colors at once is that so I don't have to be changing colors and going crazy and thinking too hard.
It's just easier to do all the same colors at the same time.
Then, what color will I make this computer?
How about gray? What color will his screen be?
How about blue? What color will his table be?
How about something like that?
How about something with more contrast to his pants?
What about his chair?
What about his pants?
I like dark colored chairs.
But not that color.
How about that color?
So if anybody's seeing how easy it is to do my job, you're probably hating me right now.
Gotta color his tongue.
I think he only shows his tongue one more time.
Then let's do some floors.
So first I highlight the floor area Then I pick a color that's relatively dark.
I'm going to find a dark that's got some gray in it.
Then I'm going to pick the gradient tool and it fills in the floor with a little bit of interesting texture.
I'm going to take a boring wall color.
Stick it in there.
And then the wall and the hallway.
Let's make that same family, but a different color with a little bit of gradient.
So it looks like there's a light source coming from the hallway.
Then, I have no idea if anybody's watching this, by the way.
It looks like the comments stopped, but Let's see if...
So it says there are 752 people, but I'm seeing no comments on my screen.
I don't know if you're seeing comments.
I think I'll forge ahead as if there are comments because I'm almost done.
Let's take this color.
Let's green it up a little bit.
In case you're wondering, I do draw this building every time I do it.
So even though I don't have to because I could just cut and paste it, I like the fact that it looks slightly different every time.
It's part of the magic.
Let's see. Pick a dark color.
Make it look like there's a little something going on.
Then let's do the sky.
Different blue.
lighter.
Now we've got to do the backgrounds that are compatible.
So we're going to do...
You can do all the backgrounds at the same time.
So I'm selecting all these background spaces, and then I've got my color, and then I put in the gradient, and then I'll just keep doing that.
And then...
Add that gradient.
Got all my background colors.
You can see I forgot a few colors, so I'll go back and make sure I got Dilbert's tongue inside of Dilbert's mouth.
And boss's pants.
Whatever color that was.
Now just check my work.
Looks good.
Looks good. Looks good.
Looks good.
Okay. Now where are all the words you say?
Well, they're coming back.
Move you to this camera for a minute.
Okay.
And then we'll come back to the main camera in a moment.
I'm just looking for something.
There it is. Alright, so here's the black and white version.
Here's the colorized version.
And it was easier to take the text out when I was colorizing it.
Because then I could flatten the layers and the text did not get flattened.
The reason we don't want the text to be flattened is that there's less of editing.
Hopefully not a lot, but if my editor sees a misspelled word or something, it's easier that they can edit the text on their side.
So I make sure that the text is a separate layer so that my editor has access to that layer.
So they can edit as they need.
So that's what it looks like.
That is a finished Dilbert comic.
There it is.
Okay.
And... Probably the total time for writing that and for creating it was two hours, if you count.
No, maybe a little more, two and a half hours.
And there it is, and it's ready for submission.
How do I submit it?
Well, easily. Come back to this camera.
All I do is drag it to a file on my desktop and it ends up in New York at my syndication company and they do the rest, giving it to the world.
So that's what it looks like.
I realized that this was not like my normal periscopes, but I thought some people would like to see what it looks like to be a cartoonist.
Let me see if there are any more comments.
I lost the comments for some reason.
I think I'll sign off at Periscope and then get back in and see if the comments are there.
Nope, no comments.
That's probably a bug.
I'll figure that out later.
But in the meantime, have a good Sunday.
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