desk diary - A Quick Overview of VFORROW's Art & Design Toolbelt
sharing design and drawing software used by vevna forrow (jazz marie kaur)
I’m sure you guys know I acquired you could say an obsession with reel and video design the past few years alongside video edits too when I stopped drawing cartoons around 2019. I guess you could say it was my own form of art therapy or rather therapeutic in a sense while dealing with physical challenges and pain.
REEL DESIGN
A lot of the time I get DM’d on Instagram: “What do you use for your reel designs?” I didn’t start dabbling in digital collage reel and video-based art further until the end of 2020. I think the first digital collage ever was back in high school sometime before 2013 with inspo being Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. My first magazine collage was in the 6th or 7th grade it was this underwater scuba diver scene and then a few fish interacting with various coral around the edge or wedged inside orange life-saver tube elements. I think I still have it in storage somewhere from when I moved.
Although I’ve briefly tried apps like Capcut, PREQUEL, and a few other motion effect apps, for a few weeks, I just use Canva nowadays. This quick lyric video for example that I did for fun was made solely with Canva and also the earlier chocolate visualizer.
Too many apps in the Apple store have recurring hefty subscription fees so I don’t like that at all of course. You can do a lot of fun things with Canva (it’s a playground) and I typically like to create templates from scratch or modify existing ones as much as possible for reels. Additionally, for fun in reels I overlay and save multiple built-in Instagram effects and combine them over collages I do or sometimes use my friend’s photography or database public domain photos from Morgue File and Unsplash just for fun. You do run out of storage space pretty fast when you save and overlay or combine elements. one at a time.
Speaking of IG, I have had recently quite a negative ongoing experience with Instagram because it’s odd what’s flagged constantly or restricted, and was never like that before for video edits, etc. Also, my story reach on my pen name account was zapped completely or perhaps it could be what others called boxed in and “shadowbanned” too and engagement has fallen there. The story visibility and post reach on our Dipity accounts is about the same or fine though unlike my pen name account, hence the pivot towards Substack more to share.
Anyways, before Canva and before 2019, I was very much so a computer mouse-drawn artist and also a paper-cut sketch artist, and created The Tiny Koala Doodle Co. (TKDC).
I will take the time to share two other applications I used quite heavily over the years for my cartoon art, TKDC, and some graphic design projects.
DIGITAL DRAWING
I love GIMP 2.0 and Inkscape. A childhood friend’s sister or I believe around middle school introduced me to GNU Image Manipulation Program aka GIMP and ever since then I’ve used it (up until 2019). I did nearly all of my wired computer-mouse-drawn art with it. I had at some point and time taken down some of my art under usernames @ jazzdraws508, Inkdorum, InkyTunnel, and thetinykoala because others were screenshotting and posting them elsewhere, but in the past few years I have reuploaded some oldies back to DeviantArt and RedBubble. I dabbled a lot in fan art and tried drawing various cartoon characters with my computer mouse, not a stylus. GIMP to me was easier to use than Inkscape for drawing animations.
I didn’t go to school for art either my major rather was a mix of technical management and adult learning theories for instructional materials. I grew up being inspired by Gary Harbo, Bruce Blitz, and Shel Silverstein. Any platform you use does take some time to learn and essentially you must stay in the loop when it comes to updates etc.
Canva I’d say is definitely worth the investment in terms of having a monthly paid plan — is about $12.99 — you can do a lot with it and I’m aware quite a few other poets use it in the community on Instagram. It’s great for digital collages. I have in the past tried tinkering with Adobe products years back, but that was primarily because I had to help troubleshoot those applications at various companies. Obviously, Adobe Suite products are neat but insanely high well fee-wise and I’ve had unusual billing headaches with them in the past, but their customer support has always been great from my expriences.
MEMORY LANE + EXAMPLE CREATIONS
One of my favorite memories was when Robert Patrick saw one of my fan art drawings of CBS Scorpion. A few others in the music world ended up using some of my marker sketch art as their social media profile photos such as Bülow. For my sketch artwork, I always used one thick card stock paper brand — Neenah Paper, and Faber Castell Markers then would cut out my drawings. Faber Castell Markers were great for me because they're odorless unlike Sharpies and other markers. There was a point and time for a few years when I did nothing but draw on hundreds of blank baseball-sized sketch cards.
Now Inkscape like GIMP is 100% free and open source as of 2024 still. I found it to be more suitable for graphics creation like for logos, but did design a wedding card once for someone in GIMP. I recall I had used Inkscape to create the front-wrapped container logo for the vegan organic ice cream company SKIRR I never fully launched because things were starting to get expensive packaging and logistic-wise.
Before these two others, I had messed around with BeFunky and PicMonkey for eBook cover designs and photo edits and both were very user-friendly. PicMonkey nowadays has a monthly paid plan after their trial.
Some features in Canva video editing-wise are substantially lacking with effects compared to Adobe AfterEffects or even Filmora, but overall it is useful for quick trims on videos and adding text and audio. I don’t use AI and am not crazy about their AI generative features they’ve integrated into Canva with keywords, etc. There are times I have had to import more font styles as well.
So yeah that’s all I’ve ever used. The very first applications however, I started using were just the built-in ones on Windows PCs such as Microsoft (MS) Paint, but GIMP is my fave over Inkscape. I’ve done just free trials of other software over time too. Of course, I can’t cover all of the elements and features I use in Canva in this Substack as video tutorials would be more appropriate so this is more of an outline with additional memory bites for you guys.
I’ll also share I just remembered there was also this awesome challenging YouDraw community — not be confused with other YouDraw apps. I was a longtime user of that website. You had a super small vertical rectangular box to draw in with nothing but a black digital marker with your mouse and others would vote or comment. It was really cool to see what others created in such great detail. I miss it, I think if you go to their site now it says “they’ll be back possibly” I can’t remember but my username I think was just astronaut. Here’s a screenshot I found from back then:
If you want to purchase stickers of my older art, you can visit RedBubble or Amazon Merch. Quite a few of my friends put them on their laptops still. The fave is the chicken sticker. I’ll put any sales towards Dipity Literary Magazine operational expenses. We also have a small gift shop out on the Dipity Lit Mag site, but I’m working on adding more typewriter and poetry focused designs to it.
https://www.redbubble.com/people/jazzdraws508/shop
SERIES I WATCHED RECENTLY
Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) on Netflix: My VFORROW Rating 2.9 out of 5 (definitely loved the animated version of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2003) instead and The Legend of Korra (2012) was my fave among these. I wasn’t a huge fan of the live-action ones, but just really loved the animated series by Nickelodeon.
And if you have any further questions on designs or the design software I mentioned totally ask. You’re welcome to pledge your support to this Substack instead too if you’d like, but it’s optional.
Well, I’m going to take a nap now guys [ just kidding], but was curious what design software have you used for your own projects? Feel free to comment at the bottom any other recommendations or share your thoughts on the above and I’ll check back as soon as I can!
OTHER NEWS
We now have a new free opportunity for musicians and bands to share their work through this Substack similar to the writer Q&A community spotlight. If you’re interested in partaking visit our Submittable page!
We’re still looking for more spoken word submissions too and will be extending a few deadlines out a little further.
Also, it seems others do like the digital flipbook access started up last week — our six day reading metrics show about ~4,800 views on the magazines collectively thus far!
Just an FYI: I won’t paywall all bonus share content nor will these be daily back-to-back. Thanks so much for your support! Have awesome days ahead!
— VFORROW (Jazz Marie Kaur)