Why I love comments

I got two interesting comments from my last Daily Dog. The first was that daily was too often, hence the two-day interval for this email. (Does anybody strongly disagree.) The second was that the text was too hard to read. Like I said, I'm planning on redesigning the book anyway, but until I take care of that (next project, I promise), I'll just reproduce the text here:

"Wednesday we went to Prospect Park. We had a great time glaumphing around the meadow, although it gets hard on the knees awfully fast. I may buy some kneepads and expense them later on my Schedule C come April. 

Playing fetch was less successful. The kid is too little to throw very hard, and I don't really like the taste of bark. "Look," I told him, "you don't want the stick and I don't want the stick, so let's forget it." He was cool with that, so we galumphed some more until it started to drizzle and we headed home."

Next post: dogs!

Thinking about format

Breezing through the artwork suddenly. This means that I'm getting to the point where I've got to start thinking about the design of the project. The spread I'm posting here is awfully rough. I've got to to reconsider type, layout and even some additional spot illustrations. For instance, the last paragraph on today's post is screaming for an accompanying panel. Rethinking (Hell, let's be honest -- thinking) about the design is going to be a day or two's worth of work. I don't want to get behind turning out the pages in the meanwhile. So I think my plan is to keep pushing ahead with the story through this week, and then taking a day or two to re-design and represent what I've done. When I've finished, I'll post a PDF of the story so far. Any thoughts?

Meet the New Boss

At last we meet the kid. He doesn't say much, but he has presence. I figure he's somewhat less than two years old, still wearing diapers, and talking but not yet talking too much. 

By the way, I should mention that while the rest of the cast of characters are straight out of my head,  the protagonist is modeled (physically, at least) after my old friend and fellow U. City alumnus Rob Brown. Rob is a very talented actor. His greatest asset is his amazingly expressive face. It's like rubber: it bends, it stretches, it doesn't look quite the same from any two angles. 

It drives me crazy. You try drawing a guy who doesn't even have the courtesy to look like himself from minute to minute. So any slip ups in likeness are all Rob's fault. I owe him an enormous amount of gratitude and not a little suffering. 

More later!

It May Have Been a Misnomer

Alas, "The Daily Dog" has not been so daily lately. Sorry. Worked called. And, yes, I got stuck. I had worked ahead on paper that turned out not to be too suitable for watercolor. So I ruined three of four or the same pages. And then I had some problems with my direct mailing program. I'm pressing forward now, so I'm going to be daily once more. Kinehora.

Oh, lest I forget: here's the page.

Work and re-work

Sorry for the skipped day. I ended up reworking this picture a couple of times. The original version was too tightly drawn. I lost the sense of spontaneity that the subject matter requires. (The sketch I ended up using is shown below, by the way.) Also, now that I've decided to work with watercolor, I'm realizing that the artwork has to be conceived with a stronger sense of light. Originally, I was thinking that I would handle each page like a poster, with large flat areas of color, but with watercolor, that's really failing to use the medium.  

Finally, you may have noticed that the type has changed. It turns out that my handwriting can be fairly hard to read, something that should have been apparent to me in the last 39-odd years, but that somehow I managed to ignore. I will probably continue to play with the formatting for awhile, though.

More fun, tomorrow..

And we're off!

Here's an interesting story about this page. Well, interesting to me anyway. You may find it totally uninteresting, in which case you should mention it in the comments, or just send me a personal note ruining my day. 

My initial plans for this book were to draw and ink everything by hand, scan it all in, and add the color on the computer. That's how I did the cover, and that's how I do a lot of my illustration work. I even bought a beautiful little device called a Cintiq to help me do this. A Cintiq is basically a 21-inch monitor that is also a graphics tablet, so I can use a stylus to draw directly onto the screen. I recommend it to anyone who in the field who is questing for an enormous tax-deductible expense. 

But I actually decided to finish the page as a watercolor. Why? Well, here's the thing. I had a lousy scanner. When I would scan in a drawing - and I had to scan it in in pieces -  it would distort the damn thing, and the pieces wouldn't line up, so I'd have to spend an hour tinkering in PhotoShop just to get the drawing to look like the drawing. After only three, maybe five, years of complaining about this, I finally bought a really good scanner. It's an Epson Expression 10000XL, and I recommend to anyone who still has any money left over after paying for the Cintiq. And if you do, call me. Maybe we can go out to dinner sometime. 

Back to the point: Now that I could do fast, accurate scans, it occurred to me that I might as well paint the thing by hand and then scan it in. Believe it or not, I find it actually faster to paint by hand. I realize that this admission has just ruined my chances of every becoming a spokesman for Cintiq, but such is life. I like the chaos of a hand-drawn painting. Hope you feel the same. 

Incidentally, the lettering is all being done on the computer. I like it, but if anyone thinks it's too hard to read, this would be a good time to tell me.