Archive for July, 2007
7 items.
This one will probably go down as one of my personal favorites. The writing`s a bit blah, but all in all I think it`s got a nice fast pace and it connects pretty well. Of course, I am biased, seeing as it`s my creation.
I backed myself in to a corner early on, in the first strip, even, when I said they were together eight years. Now they`re married and all sorts of things. It`s not that I didn`t want that, but I lost the flexibility: Other characters will have to do dating jokes, etc, and at two strips a week (the current rate) I can`t really do a lot of character development, so I don`t want a big cast. I should have learned from, well pretty much every other cartoonist. I am particularly thinking of Bill Watterson and the early strip showing Calvin snaring Hobbes with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
If I had kept it ambiguous, I would have had so much more room to play. I took the cheap laugh as eagerly as I would have the PBJ sandwich.
Cartoonists are stupid that way.
(Yes, that`s a throwback to the comic I mentioned)
It`s like, to the airline industry, the average American has not changed substantially since 1940. Say what you want about the obesity “epidemic”, the fact still remains that Americans are larger than they used to be, taller and what have you, and it`s about time the airlines caught up. I`m willing to cut some slack, seeing as airplanes tend to run for 20 or so years and refurbishments are expensive, but with the new planes coming out over the next few years, let`s hope the airlines are doing their part and requesting larger seats to make the passengers more comfortable.
Don`t hold your breath, of course. What little I`ve seen on them seem to indicate it`s the same old size seats. What a joke.
My presentation was met with your standard presentation`s reception: Cold indifference. I met plenty of people later who really liked my work, but in general people have a hard enough time staying awake through four or five papers in a row. Maybe that`s why they can be
so mean
This one is full of experiments. The coats of the wolves (yes, that`s what they`re supposed to be) is a base of gray, with a darker gray airbrushed over using the tablet sensitivity to judge opacity, not size. I also used a gray with some brown in it for another coat, which had the hue jitter set all the way up. Then I applied the highlight coat with soft edges but the rest of the brush set to “normal”. I like the result, though I`m sure with more practice I could do better. That`s why I threw in the extra one in the last panel, though it also kind of shows how the protagonist views the moderator and audience.
There is shading all over the place, and I made sure to get everything I could think of. I spent a lot of time erasing things I didn`t like, but I`m not too displeased with the results here. The center “panel” gets a dark tint to make it look more foreboding. Boring subject matter? Just add a dash of drama!
I really did see this happen to a young woman, though not quite as badly. Part of it was “her fault”, as she didn`t have the proper slides for her presentation. At least, she didn`t think she did. Part of it, though, was unavoidable, and frankly, it was clear that English wasn`t her first language, though she spoke pretty well. I`d like to see anyone who grilled her have to sit through her presentation in her native tongue then have to answer a test. Say, ten questions.
To make it sporting, for every question they get wrong, they should be hit with a cattle prod. That may not be commensurate to what they did to her, but it would drive the point home.