Once again I've decided to pull back the curtain and give you a peek into the mysterious world of cartooning! This journey is not for the faint of heart, so those with delicate constitutions should turn back now. As for the rest of you, remember, you've been warned!
Anyway, what I thought I'd do today was show you the entire process I used to bring a recent cartoon from idea to finished art.
Okay, first the idea. To make a long story short I was watching T.V.when our yorkie, Logan, went into full wolverine mode and attacked our german shepherd, Ranger, who was getting on his nerves. This got me thinking about small dogs and how they tend to think of themselves as the alpha males, and, lo and behold, a cartoon idea was born.
Next came the rough sketch.
I always keep a pad of paper in my living room so I can sketch out any ideas that may pop into my head. The drawing on the left was the rough that I did that night (as you can see it was done on the bottom of a page that I had previously been drawing on, thus the figures at the top). The next day I did a cleaner version of the rough (seen on the right). Astute observers will notice that I chose to draw a wiener dog instead of a yorkie - the reason for the change of breeds is simple: yorkies are really furry, and furry things are a pain in the ass to draw. NOW GET OFF MY BACK!
I wasn't happy with the look of the dog so I played around with the image on a scrap piece of paper until I found one that worked for me (indicated by the pointing hand). You can see on the same piece of paper a reworking of the female character, which was used in the second rough seen above.
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| Note the lake in the painting, which looks like a deformed pancake. |
Using the second rough and the new dog drawing I did the inked version using a brush pen and a light box. I tend to make quite a few mistakes at this stage. In the bad ol' days I would have fixed the errors with great big gobs of white-out, but in these modern times I make my corrections in Photoshop. (As you can see I indicate my screw-ups with a small arrow so I don't miss any.) The next step is to scan the drawing and drop it into Photoshop where I clean it up. I then add the border and punchline. This is the result:
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| TA-DA! |
The final step is to add some colour and, voila, a new cartoon is born!
Nothing left now but to send it out into the world, then sit back and brace myself for the soul crushing rejection letters.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today's post. See you next time!
UPDATE: I was looking over this post when I realized that the deformed pancake lake can still be seen in the cleaned up finished line art. This is because at some point I decided to keep it, but in the colouring stage decided it had to go. What can I say - I'm a bit of a flake.
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