NEW STRIP :: FUN WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: One Crazy Summer, Part 5
I am trying not to complain out loud about these little sketchbook strips lately--I mean, these strips are pretty much the only thing I am doing lately besides working on conventioneering. And using the bathroom. So they're a little rough out of necessity. Also, I am digging the necessity to kind of rush them, which makes me concentrate less on the fussiness and more on what's happening. Not that that has made these any better, but I feel like it's important to keep slogging away. I definitely think that future "finished" strips will be stronger because of it. I mean, as of this writing, I've been doing a weekly strip for all of... six months? So I am fortunate in knowing that I will only get better, which not everyone is fortunate enough to know.
But also it's interesting to see the effect of drawing small and blowing it up, rather than the reverse, which is normally the case. For instance, I already work pretty small, at around 8" x 10", basically 125% of my print size of 6" x 7.5". This is mainly because I letter better when it's smaller, and also because I will OCD a bajillion little marks onto whatever, which is crippling when you work bigger.
But these little sketchbook strips are just 4" x 5"--125% SMALLER than they would print in a typical issue of DHARBIN! (#2 is available, I've just been too busy to talk about it. Hit me with an e-mail if you want to buy one for $5). Which is weird, right? But check this out:
This drawing is maybe an inch high in my sketchbook, but if I scan it at a super-high res and blow it up, who's to know? And it took maybe all of 5 minutes to draw and color, and that was with most likely a ton of nose-picking thrown in. If I were to draw it larger, I would fuss all day with the brush strokes and trying to make it look natural and all that, but by doing it small and quick, it probably looks 500% better. This is something I need to work on more--if I could get good at doing tiny fast comics that looked good blown up, I would have finally found an acceptable workaround to my a) obsessiveness, and b) boredom. I could be wrong, but I bet these two things plague a ton of cartoonists. You can click on that image above to see it bigger.
Oh wait what were we talking about? Oh yeah, a new strip. Okay time for bed!