This is a hard one to get out, largely because I am so emotionally invested in it and I want it to be exactly right. So each panel of it is a Lot of work. And adding to that is I can’t use any of my usual time saving copy and paste tricks. Nearly everything in each panel is unique from all the others. The only exceptions are the backgrounds of three of them, one of which I’ll show you here. This is the second from the last strip up in GIMP, which I’ve been using ever since Adobe stuck an eight-hundred and fifty dollar knife in my back…

I’m breaking a rule I had when I started this cartoon story, that I would always use cross-hatching for shading and textures and such. I wanted the story to be a visual nod to the black & white underground comix back in the day. The printing they used wasn’t always the best, but they made it work, sometimes with zipatone, but more often just by painstakingly (really Really painstakingly) cross-hatching.

But for this one episode I’m using the paintbrush and grey tones here and there, to make some of it snap out, but also to create a distinctive change in mood. I used to do a lot of that in Photoshop, but you can’t depend on anything from Adobe, nobody can, so I switched to GIMP and other open source artist tools, and this is the first time I’ve done something like this with a gradient in GIMP. It worked perfectly.

This episode is forming up almost Exactly as I’d visualized it back in 2005, when I set out to do this story. It’s been a long road and I’ve rewritten many parts of the story as I’ve gone along, but not this part. This is, as The Doctor would say, a fixed point in time. This, and one other, which I hope to also get to soon. I’ve said the story I’m telling is one third what actually happened, one third artistic license, and one third pure imagination (as in the parts involving my libido and left/right brains as imaginary figures). This is the part that really happened just this way.

I was having a lot of trouble and frustration with one of the panels I was working on the other day, and when that happens it helps to work for a while on a different part. Some classmates might recognise the place I’m looking at into the sunset there. There, at the moment of truth.