The Ink Puddle Art Blog: Fighting a Losing Battle

Okay, so there is no way I am going to complete 10 daily cartoons for the cartoon contest I told you about earlier this week. I waited way too long to start, didn't have 10 working scripts to flesh out in pencil and inks and I am not independently wealthy and need my 9-5 job, so there you go. But I do encourage Ink Puddle readers to check out the competition and vote for your favorite. Click on the graphic below to visit the contest site.

Click on the image above to visit the contest site.

As for me, here is what I started with as cartoon strip #1. I wanted the strip (or at least one of them) to be timely in some fashion. For me, this means a quick look on the calendar. President's Day is coming up, and that can allow me to squeeze in some topical political humor as well. I start off real basic with real basic and quick thumbnail sketches. They just have to be coherent enough for me to decode which characters are which and if I am going for a particular look on their faces or displaying a specific emotion or are supposed to be talking. Speech balloons are included but can always be moved (but sometimes the proportions and spacial design of a thumbnail works best, so never think of thumbnails as primitive or an early step to be disregarded).

The thing with thumbnails is this: NEVER ERASE! Just keep going, get it down on paper, keep it simple. Don't be afraid to add details, but the important part is to get a good sense of the image you see in your head down on paper. As for writing: I am bad with being precise in my script. I will sometimes leave a final script until I have the cartoon scanned and I am ready to use the computer to add text.

Prelim thumbnails and rough outline of dialog.

I think I transferred and modified my ideas fairly successfully to the panels. The placement pretty much stays the same.

non-reproducing blue pencil draft

And then I inked it in. It's times like these that I wish I worked with a colorist. Then I could commit to a kind of animated style of cartoon drawing, meaning lots of outlines, not much in terms of solid blacks and shadows. My original concept of this strip was for Gandhi to be drawn in a more cross-hatched, stippple shadowed pen style, and The Devil to be inked in brush like a cartoon character. You can see a better example of this in the older Devil and Mr. G strips I provide below.

If you click through to the full size image, you can see some the ink smudges (mistakes)

And then I added colors and text in Paint Shop Pro. I did not tailor these images for the blog, so if you want to clearly read the words, YOU SHOULD CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL-SIZE.

But the fact is, it is not enough. I wasn't in love with the script (or the idea of the script), but I had to go with something to get the ball rolling. I suppose if I had a team working for me, where I could do the art and someone else could scan and color and add the text and publish it, maybe I would have time to do a strip daily. This reinforces my idea that I should work to do a "cut-and-paste" comic strip where I can add a character with a particular emotion that is already drawn, inked, scanned, and colored, and then just add the dialog.