Are You Ready to "Walk" Inside an Illustrated World?
Immersive Comic Art, and an Infinite Canvas
Have you ever dreamed of drawing in a 3 dimensional environment? How about creating scenes on an infinite canvas? I sure have. When I discovered Mental Canvas —a drawing app that allows you to draw 2D images in a 3 dimensional space —that dream became reality.
I’m not going to ramble on about— I’ll let you explore on your own.
Here are 3 pieces I created (2 are interactive, so let your fingers do the “walking”.)
The first is an interactive comic scene titled “Gallery” that I created for Mental Canvas. Click below to enter. (Note: You’ll have a better experience on a mobile device. You can do it on a desktop, but it’s more fun with a touchscreen.)
Click on the image to enter:
The second piece, titled “Theatre of the Absurd”, is not interactive. It’s a brief video of me poking around the absurd theatre I created while experimenting with Mental Canvas. (More about Mental Canvas below.)
The 3rd piece is an interactive doodle titled “DoodleScape”. Look inside the house from the back door or back window.
Click on the image to enter:
For you process junkies
I’ll say this about Mental Canvas: I’ve never felt more engaged with drawing and creating as I have with this extraordinary drawing tool. The app is not overly technical (if it was I wouldn’t love it so much), and the drawing experience is much like any other drawing app, only you get to draw in a 3 dimensional space, on an infinite canvas. By infinite I mean you can never reach the edges of the “paper” or “canvas.” It’s like drawing in a space where you can make lines forwards, backwards, and to the sides without ever reaching an edge. You can “build/draw” walls, floors, ceilings, objects. The only limitation is the size of the file. If it’s too large things get slower as it takes more computing power. To give you an idea, I’ve created scenes/drawings up to 425 mb, and that was a teeny bit on the big side. (Yes, if you give me an infinite canvas I literally lose my mind with it. I needed an intervention to keep me from adding more stuff!)
Bonus: The app gives you the option to make your drawing interactive, or save as a video. Built in are video editing tools so that you can edit the video, and control the camera’s shots and fly-throughs. What else can I tell you? It’s ridiculously awesome.
If you’re a creator, you can get the app from the Mental Canvas website (links below). You’ll need an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, or a Surface Pro and pen. Oh, and you’ll also need your imagination!
If you’re a viewer, I hope you had fun with these little worlds I created. Please tell me in the comments if you’d like to see more, or if you can think of any other creative ways to use Mental Canvas.
Links:
Mental Canvas: https://mentalcanvas.com
Get the Mental Canvas App: https://mentalcanvas.com/download
Creators: Hope you have fun with it! Tell me in the comments how you’re using Mental Canvas.
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That’s all for now, folks! Thank you for being here, thank you for reading me, thank you for looking at my stuff, thank you thank you thank you. Have a Merry Holiday/Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanzaa/Other Religious Holiday/Secular-Time-Off/Shopping-Thing-Day! Have I got everyone covered?
Seriously, warmest regards, and let’s look forward with eager hearts to 2025.
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Some years ago, you mentioned on your website you had "teamed up with King Features and Mental Canvas to create an interactive 2D/3D comic story in 12 parts," to be released in 2021. As far as I know, nothing more was ever mentioned about that. Are you at liberty to reveal anything about that project, like what it would have been about or what it would have looked like? It sounded interesting!
Hi RIna, Thanks for reminding me about what Mental Canvas can do. For the umpteenth time, I'll poke at it and hopefully post something worth looking at!