Tag: cartooning

Different Planet

I’M BACK exploring the final frontier; comic strips. Here’s the next panel in the little story that I’m illustrating as part of the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures course.

My first attempt had the astronaut planting the flag but for him to do this with his right hand was awkward, if I wanted to keep the left to right action that runs through a western comic strip (it goes the opposite way in Japanese Manga comics).

Hopefully the implication is that he has just planted it himself, rather than discovered an existing flag on the moon he’s just landed on.

It’s tricky explaining a sequence of events in just one panel, but I can now move on to the end of the story. These last two panels show his return being greeted with much fanfare and his realisation that he’s landed on the wrong planet.

Sat-nav

The next part of the exercise is to add some extra panels and gags. The first thing that occurred to me was to cover the abrupt jump from moon to alien planet so here’s the lunar module heading back on its return journey.

How does the astronaut become lost in space? It’s got to be his sat-nav that’s faulty. Uttoxeter was the first town to mind when I thought of sat-nav, so Utopia sounded like a suitable name for an alien planet. Taunton and Titan might just work or Mars and Marsden . . .

No, it could only be Uttoxeter. That ‘x’ in the middle makes it sound suitably alien. Or wrong.

Just to tie things up I include a frame to show touch-down on the wrong planet.

Here’s the new, extended sequence;

Seeing all eight panels together really gives the impression that this is some kind of a story.

So my truncated new story could start with the sat-nav problem and end with meeting the aliens. Not very funny but at least it has a beginning a middle and an end. I have much to learn.

The Little Flash Rabbit

IT’S THE WEEKEND, so as a break from my normal work I decided to have a go, once again, at creating a Flash Animation. This rabbit, which would have failed the audition for Watership Down, is from a tutorial on ‘Simple Animation’ in Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden’s The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning.

A year ago, I read right through the Teach Yourself Visually Guide to Flash MX but that has the disadvantage that when you get to Chapter 9, ‘Create Tweened Animations’, they expect you to have picked up the basics. I’m afraid that with Flash, which I use only once or twice a year, I’ve invariably forgotten the basics. The Step-by-Step Guide gives you clear simple instructions in full.

Effects like this Shape Tweening are simple to achieve once you know how. I like the way the Step-by-Step Guide casually mentions a few really useful keystrokes for Flash in the two paragraphs of instructions for shape tweening.

But I’m afraid that’s going to be the end of Flash for me for another six months! What a complex program! Everything seems designed to do what you don’t expect it to do. What finally stumped me was trying to do the simplest of processes, the selection of a sequence of frames in the animation: ‘select frames . . . by clicking and dragging the mouse across the timeline’. In my version of the program, that just drags the first frame along the timeline, leaving a sequence of blank frames. Most discouraging.

I’m not completely illiterate when it comes to computers but Flash does win the prize for the most abstruse and contrary program ever designed. Perhaps it’s too much to expect to run an old program like Flash MX on Windows 7.

Cartoon Course

I came across The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curits Tappenden a couple of weeks ago and after the final push of getting my walks booklet into print, I thought that I deserved a bit of a change, so I’m going to have a few days off to go through some of the practice exercises in the book.

My main thing, of course, is drawing from nature, so why should I be interested in cartooning? This book is a practical introduction to drawing as a way of telling a story or communicating an idea, which is what I try to do in my publications. If drawing from nature was my sole concern, I could just as well present my drawings in isolation – framed on a gallery wall, for example – but invariably I present them as a sequence, along with varying amounts of text.

I’m hoping this book will make me rethink the way that I tell stories and communicate ideas in my publications.

Opposing Black and White

This first exercise calls for fineliner pen (I used a Pilot drawing pen) and black Indian ink applied with a number 3 round brush. Starting it in pencil, I’ve closely followed Ivan Hissey’s step-by-step but I’ve gone for a geological context rather than the darkened room of the original. I like the woodcut style, where you aim to balance the black and white portions of the image, but to get the sharp gouged line of a woodcut calls for some confidence and forward planning when you ink in with the brush. In the places where you can still see my drawing pen line it comes over as too soft and tentative for this style of cartoon.

I look foward to getting a bit more practice . . .