Committing Errant Thoughts to Paper / Another Dinosaur Entry

When something pops into your brain, it is best to put it on paper.  This can be tough.  Do you do thumbnail sketches? Do you make it into a larger project or do you push through and try to finish it as a kind of one-off one-night project?  It takes persistence, patience, and sometimes a commitment to make it a finished work with blemishes.  In other words, get it done, get it on paper, get it posted on the web, and get moving on another project.  No dilly-dallying, no saving it for another time.  If it's not perfect, who cares?  As long as you put forth effort, and publish it.  Put it out there. Thus...

I did this with pencil and inked over with a nib pen, with some text and text boxes added on the computer.  Using a brush would have 1) taken too long to finish and 2) probably would have been much more effort.  Am I lazy?  Sure, of course, but I also wanted to get it done, and move on.  So, with ink-stained hands, I waited for the ink on the paper to dry.  I didn't want to scan it too soon.  Never would I ever want to dirty my Epson GT-15000.

I am still learning the art of laying out a page and laying out a panel in such a way that there is composition to the artwork but also room for speech balloons and text boxes and/or room for other narrative text to be added in.  I definitely think in text and pictures when I am planning out a strip, but it is difficult to account for additional text.  It is a skill I have not yet mastered.  I feel like I also had to come to a decision as to whether the strip would be in B&W or color and if I would do any halftone effects as layers.  I went with "simple is best" and figured I would do a simple line drawing, no shadowing, no layers, no halftones.  Just what I drew with text added.

Some things to note: Is there nose-picking featured in this 8 panel comic strip?  Yes.  What are the circles / dots on the nose in panel 5?  They are large pores on my nose.  I am self conscious about the pores on my nose.  Did the dinosaurs really become extinct because of one erupting volcano? Yes, and you heard it here first. Why is the final panel bigger than the preceding panels?  Great question!  You know how TV sitcoms have a final closing joke?  Or how a Shakespearean sonnet has the final two lines as a rhyming couplet (g, g)?  I think comic strips can have that same punchline or closing or statement at the end, and having the final panel look different has some meaning to it.  I do the same thing in my The Devil and Gandhi comic.  In my moments of determination and inspiration (read: insanity), I think of doing 1 comic or cartoon a day.  Which I think I could do if I stick to simplistic drawings, or scan in pencil and forget about inking or draw in pen and forget about pencil, but I rarely do that.  I guess we will see what shows up tomorrow night.