you can always learn things. even on sick days!

Have you ever had an activity that was forever tainted by sickness? I know it’s a bit irrational, but I’m talking about the way you do something while sick and never want to do that thing anymore when you are well again. For instance, I never again tried to watch The Prisoner. More recently, I stopped playing the game Atom Zombie Smasher even though I was very addicted. I got sick, spent the night tossing and turning, and had wild, AZS-themed dreams wherein I couldn’t get the music out of my head. Ever since then I haven’t touched it. [November 28, 2011]

the "hands" step is for advanced artists ONLY

The second panel is amusing in retrospect. Take a look at whatever’s on the front page, versus this one. Over time, the eyes have drifted further apart and definitely gotten smaller. I couldn’t say exactly why that is, but it seems to make characters more endearing (or “cuter”, I suppose) and a little less intelligent. The overall effect is, I feel, a little less “threatening”, as though my stick people could ever appear threatening in the first place. The Japanese have a good handle on cute, non-threatening characters — I’m probably influenced by that. [November 28, 2011]

maybe we should give it a try though, just to see?

This comic is based on an actual conversation I had while I used to be an educational assistant at the local high school. Part of my job was to work with a student with Asperger’s Syndrome. This individual had a lot of fairly wild ideas, like becoming an international diamond thief or somehow granting himself superpowers via “cat DNA”. I attempted to be the voice of reason and also to keep him on task.

One day, he strolled into the computer lab and wondered aloud if there were any thunderstorms forecasted for the weekend, explaining that he was planning to harness said lightning in order to re-animate a deceased relative of his. I responded that this was not a good idea. Of course he demanded to know why, and though I wanted to argue that it was “wrong” I found myself unable to properly explain how I knew that.

In the end I had to take the “it just won’t work” line, something I did fairly often (even though sometimes I really felt like a buzzkill). [November 24, 2011]

hooray for products that advertise your personal problems

One thing I didn’t pay strict attention to in the early comics was differentiating other people from myself. I established from the start that I’d draw myself as the most basic stick-person possible (path of least resistance, you see) but I didn’t always remember that it can be confusing to add other people to the mix and have them look, well, pretty much the same.

Light hair is a super-simple way to change that. For light hair I draw a stick person, and then throw a few spikey lines across the forehead. Boom, altogether different character. I’m not going to go and count, but I’m betting that if the comic requires a non-specific “extra” character they’ll have light hair nine times out of ten. [November 24, 2011]

perfectly good door! right there! waiting for you!

I foolishly thought that this was the debut of the brick-pattern trick in the first panel, but on further researching I found it goes all the way back to #178. What I came to learn is that it’s entirely possible to give texture to a surface you’re drawing by simply doing bits and pieces of that texture here and there, then letting the brain fill in the rest. That way I can have, for instance, a brick wall without having to draw each brick. It’s hugely time-saving and it gives some variety to comics that are otherwise set in a vague, abstract whiteness. (Like most of the first year.)

I’m fairly certain I learned this from the work of Mike Mignola, who is like this black-belt-level-40 Master of Texture. That guy throws down a line and a couple of dots and hey presto, it’s an ancient, rough-hewn stone wall. [November 16, 2011]

cheer up, Chris Martin

The Photoshop era begins here! In the wake of the collapse of Corel Painter X, which I used up until the comic just before this one, I needed something else to draw on. So I downloaded another “extended trial”…okay, yes, “pirated” if you prefer, of Photoshop CS3. It worked marvelously well out of the box. Actually, for quite a while I held that the Photoshop-era comics had my favorite line style ever.

I should try and explain that. Over the years I’ve spent a surprising — or possibly not surprising — amount of time fretting over exactly how I want my lines to look. In real life, I like drawing the best with a regular Sharpie marker, like the kind that people use to label their burned DVDs of Buffy or whatever. With those I can skip between light touches for detail and bold, thick strokes for bodies and otherwise. They’re not super hard on the edges, and if used properly the very ends of strokes can be pleasingly tapered.

The challenge, once I got an actual art tablet rather than a finicky touch-screen, has been to try and emulate the look of a sharpie drawing. And as a matter of fact the Photoshop era probably comes closest. But looking at them now, they actually seem too fuzzy, almost out-of-focus compared to my current work. There are still some things I like but I tended to aim for the “thick” side of things and I’m glad I reined that in. (Who knows, give it time and I’ll probably be saying the exact opposite again) [November 16, 2011]

can’t think of any off the top of my head, but still

Whoa, sudden style change! Thanks to the History page which I’m sure nobody reads, I can explain!

The tablet came with Corel Painter Essentials 2, which was just a thing to let you fiddle around with painting digitally. The “Essentials” part of the name meant that it was actually lacking a bunch of features of its big brother, and recognizing that, I eventually acquired an “extended trial” of the full Corel Painter X. *cough*.

Okay, cards on the table, I actually downloaded it without paying. I pirated it, to use the parlance of our times. And it worked great! If you’re looking over the comics you will probably notice changes in the line styles — thicknesses, softness of the edges, that sort of thing — every time I make a transition.

What happened is that I foolishly tried to download an update for my pirated software, and that update irrevocably broke it altogether. I was in a bind and still wanted to make sure I wrote a comic, so for one night only I switched to classy old Paint.NET. It actually doesn’t look too terribly out of place. [November 16, 2011]