Peterson Toscano is in town today, to do a performance of his Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House at Goucher College, and I had a chance to hang out with him for a bit this morning.  One of the things we discussed over lunch was fund raising ideas for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary on the Memphis Love In Action protests, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like.  I’m already in it for several grand, helping out in a way I’m not completely free to discuss, so between that and my new car I don’t have a lot of money to spare for a while and I explained this to Peterson and I guess his imagination is much better then mine because he suggested something that never occurred to me, but which should have because it’s obvious.  I can help raise money for the documentary, by auctioning some of my artwork on eBay.

Not that I’m a world renown cartoonist or anything, but some of you may appreciate owning the original artwork to some of my political cartoons, and in particular the cartoons I’ve done about Love In Action.  I’m also considering selling some of the original artwork to my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, but there’s a catch to that.  The political cartoons really do look pretty much as you see them on the cartoon page.  But all I can sell of the work I’ve done for A Coming Out Story is the final inks on Strathmore board. which look somewhat unfinished.  All the cross-hatching and the word balloons for that one are done in Photoshop, after I’ve scanned in the inks.  The exception to this are the first four or five episodes, plus My First X-Rated Movie which I did with my old dip pens.  They’re almost completely finished cartoons, including the word balloons (which are empty because I just cannot hand letter anything).

The Mark and Josh originals  are the same, except I do the coloring in Photoshop.  What I can do with those is sell the original, along with a high-quality print of the final cartoon, printed to the same size as the original artwork so they can be framed side-by-side.  100 percent of the proceeds would go to Morgan to finish the documentary.

One other thing I could do, is auction off an original political cartoon, on any topic the successful bidder chooses.

I’m just in the thinking stages of this, so don’t send me any requests or bids on artwork just yet.  But I wanted to float this out there to see how much interest there might be in this.  When I get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted, I’ll ask the folks on my mailing list how interested they might be in owning some of the original artwork for the series.

So I decided.  Manga Studio is way to complex and its workspace far too cluttered for me to concentrate on a sketch with.  Maybe I can us it in some other part of the work flow…like the layout for instance.  Its page layout and panel formatting features look really nice.  And its got an amazing array of texture screens that I still want to try out.  But for creating the initial sketches, it just doesn’t cut it.  For my hand, none of the others come close to Sketchbook Pro.

At some point I’ll start producing some cartoons with it.  Right now I’m still in a learning curve.  I’ll post some more sketches along the way.  When I do a complete cartoon in the computer I’ll let you all know which one it was, so you can compare.  Hopefully, the only person who notices the difference will be me.  As in, no more stacks of layout paper on my drawing board…no more cursing at jammed up Rapidographs…no more inhaling fixative fumes…no more erasers that tear up the paper…

Just playing around a bit with a demo version of Sketchbook Pro…

It even seems to smudge like real pencil.  But that was all done in the computer, using a Wacom pad.  I’m getting a better feel for using that pad to sketch with.  It still doesn’t feel quite right…I’m so use to the feel of real lead on paper…but I’m getting to the point now where I’m feeling comfortable enough doing this, that I want to settle on a good all around tool for it.  Photoshop really isn’t it.  At least, not for me.  And the sense I get is that’s not what Photoshop wants to be.  Photoshop doesn’t even try to emulate what real artist’s tools behave like on paper or canvas.  It’s just a really powerful bitmap editor.

There’s a bunch of tools out there like Sketchbook Pro that try to emulate the tools.  Coral Painter even goes so far as to emulate many different kinds of artist’s papers.  So far I’m finding that they all have their good points, but they’re all missing something too.  I love the way Coral Painter emulates charcoal on paper.  But I’ve never been able to get it’s pencils or brushes to feel right on my Wacom tablet. 

I’m downloading a trial version of Manga Studio next.  It’s the only tool I’ve seen that lets you turn the "paper" this way and that as you draw on it (as opposed to actually rotating the image On the paper).  It also allows you to create perspective grid layers you can adjust the horizon line and vanishing point(s) on.  Manga Studio also lets you convert bitmap layers to vector layers…which makes resizing line artwork much, Much cleaner.

But I really like the way Sketchbook Pro lets you select and adjust the tools you’re using with tablet pen gestures.  It’s quick, and less concentration breaking.  There’s a floating tool for resizing your brush/point that’s perfect.  It works like you’re dipping your brush or pen or pencil point into a well and then dragging the point in or out to whatever size you want.  It’s a snap to do while you’re busy drawing.  I wish they all had that.

One of my co-workers, who is also a cartoonist, is involved in an open source artist’s tool project, Inkscape.  It’s a vector based drawing tool along the lines of Adobe Illustrator, and it looks really nice.  Alas, as of now it’s still lacking Mac tablet support.  But if you’re using Linux it’s worth a look.  

No cartoon Monday after all.  Hopefully later in the week.  Too much other work this weekend…

A couple new political cartoons…probably Monday morning…

So…Probably not much blogging this weekend…

My friend Jon was explaining to me the other day that he’d had a hard time directing people to A Coming Out Story, in conversations where he couldn’t actually give someone a link, because it was buried a tad deep in the structure of my web site.  He’d tell them to go to my main page at brucegarrett.com, but from there it wasn’t obvious how to get to A Coming Out Story.  he suggested a link right off the main home page, which I did a little while ago (and I added one to the left column here).  But that brought me back to mind about how I’d been wanting to restructure the cartoon page generally. 

I’ve been needing to give some of my other cartoon formats their own pages here for a while now.  I’ve been tossing out these little cartoons onto the blog that never fit on the political cartoon page, or anywhere else.  Some multi-panel stuff with Mark and Josh, and just some random fun stuff like Sergeant Stoneface – Love Detective.  They all needed their own pages. 

So now they have them, and the cartoon page, instead of being only for the political cartoons (which you may have noticed I’m not doing that much of these days…) is now a central jumping off point to get to all the others.  The political cartoon page has it’s own link off the cartoon page now, as does A Coming Out Story and Mark and Josh’s cartoons and a miscellaneous Fun page where all the random fun stuff will go.  All the existing links to individual cartoon pages should still work and not be broken.  But if you come across a broken link please let me know about it and I’ll fix it as soon as I can get to it.

Okay…I’ve finished the pencils and the inks on episode ten of A Coming Out Story and scanned all the pages in.  There are five pages comprising twenty-four panels in this next episode.  All that’s left now is the Photoshopping, which I’ve already started on.  That amounts to just some touching up, adding some shadows and the crosshatching (yes…I cheat on the cross hatching now.  But it saves me weeks of work per episode…) and adding text and word balloons and panel frames.  I should be done and have it posted by tomorrow evening, barring some major problem.

I’ve been giggling the whole time I’ve been drawing this one.  I hope its contagious. 

I’d really wanted to get the pencils for episode ten of A Coming Out Story finished by Wednesday.  But it was impossible somehow.  I swear I worked on one solitary panel all night Wednesday and that was all I could get done.  I would put down a line and it wasn’t right, erase, redraw, erase, redraw…over and over and fucking over again and it was so frustrating.  Finally I got that panel done and by the time I just had to go to bed for the night I was certain that I wouldn’t finish by Sunday like I wanted to.

Thursday wasn’t much better.  Then…tonight…somehow…I got another head of steam up and I finished the pencils, and then blasted through the inking nearly halfway.  And now I’m actually further along then I’d originally wanted to be.  Go figure.

So…barring some catastrophe, I’ll have episode ten up sometime Sunday after all.  I have no idea how professionals manage to keep to their deadlines.  I just don’t.

Looks like I’ll have the pencils for episode eleven done tonight…if I’m not being distracted by this really cute new neighbor that I have that is.  I’d hoped to have them done by Sunday night but it just wasn’t possible.  But as long as I can start inking on Wednesday I can have eleven up by the end of this weekend.

I hope those of you reading this series get as many giggles while reading eleven as I’ve had drawing it.  This one’s been a lot of fun to draw.  It’s about something your gay neighbors go through during adolescence…that period of time when (if you’re a guy, say) you start realizing that you’re looking at other guys in a sexual way and it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to and you keep trying to stop you’re utterly unable to stop.  Your eyes just keep straying back to that really cute guy, and then they wander all over his body like a pencil sketching out every line and curve…and you catch yourself doing it and you think ‘stop it’ and you look away and then a few moments later your eyes just start straying right back again…  I can laugh about it now, but back then it was very, very irritating…

I finished episode nine of A Coming Out Story last weekend, and I have a road trip coming up in another couple of weekends.  I’ll be on the road for most of the month of July, first going to visit some friends in the mid-west, then out to the Four Corners area to explore a tad more, then to California and a visit with my brother, then to Portland Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Developer’s Conference.  Given my past performance getting out new episodes it seemed a sure bet that I wouldn’t have anything more up until August at the earliest.  But I have a head of steam up now, and I really really want to get episode ten up before I leave for the west.  It’s one of several upcoming ones I’ve been chafing at the bit to do since I started scripting this series in 2005.

So I’ve been trying hard to push everything else in my life aside for a couple hours every night after work.  Naturally several things suddenly popped up that needed my immediate attention and I thought I was once again letting precious drawing time pass on by.  But somehow I’ve managed to finish half the pencils on episode ten already.  I’m shooting to have all the pencils done by the end of this coming weekend.  Then I can have the episode up for sure by the following weekend.  Or even sooner.

I’ll probably take my portable drawing board (it has a parallel attached to it), my small scanner, the Wacom tablet and drawing supplies along with me on the trip.  I might be able to get another episode out while I’m on the road.  It really bothers me that I’ve been working on this thing since 2005 and it’s 2007 I only have nine episodes up.

I’m almost done with episode nine of A Coming Out Story, and I expect to have it up sometime this weekend.  Yes…it’s been over six months since the last one and I’m really sorry about that.  I started writing the script for it back in the summer of 2005, and by 2006 I had it pretty well fleshed out.  But then sometimes the past suddenly reaches out and taps you on the shoulder and that kinda makes it a bit harder to think about the way you did before.

Still following the script though.  There’ll be about fifty or so episodes when it’s all done.  Hopefully sometime before I’m eighty…

I guess one good way to overcome whatever it is that’s blocking you creatively, is to do something that expresses the thing that your mind got itself wrapped around. On a good week I can do, maybe two boards.  Most weeks I can only do one.  This weekend I did four.  But they’re not quite finished yet.  If I can keep this head of steam up I might get them done by tomorrow evening.  All I have left to do basically is some Photoshop touch-ups, and lettering.  But I decided to take a break from it tonight and go to bed.  If I press it, I’ll stop seeing what I’m working on and overlook mistakes that will make me cringe later…I just know it.  So I’ll call it a day now, and take it up again with fresh eyes when I get home from work tomorrow evening.

For this one thing I’m doing something I’ve almost never do, something I’ve always been afraid to do ever since high school.  I’m drawing my pencils right on the board, instead of on a sheet of layout paper.  Lately I’ve been feeling more confidant in my line art, and also my ability to fix mistakes in Photoshop.  The layout paper has been like a crutch in some respects, in that I knew I could always skip over my mistakes, or correct them, when I did the transfer to the board.  To do the transfer, I put a sheet of graphite paper down between a Bristol board and my layout paper pencils, and then I over the pencils with another sheet of layout paper and draw the line art over them.  I end up with a board with faint graphite line art that I often have to touch up a bit, before starting on the inks.  So that extra step of transferring the line art always meant I was drawing the line art twice.  If I can just do the inks right over the pencils then I save a lot of time.  On the other hand, having the abilty to store the pencils away in case I messed up the board during the inking, or just for later use somewhere else, has always been a plus.

I’ve actually been experimenting with a small light tablet I bought a few months ago.  Using that I can put the pencils under a Bristol board, and then with the light switched on I can see them through the board, and theoretically just start inking.  I’ve tried it a few times…the last two political cartoons I finished were done that way.  And I have another Mark and Josh cartoon that’s ready for the inks that I intend to do that way.  But I’m finding the light tablet a tad awkward to use.  Normally, I just tape everything to a piece of Masonite that I can turn this way and that while I draw.

I won’t be able to start on Bagheera’s secondary hard disk upgrade until this thing I’m dragging out of myself is finished (because I’m still using that drive until this is done), so it looks like Tuesday evening at the earliest that I get started on that. 

I’m busy trying to get a Mark and Josh cartoon finished before the Oscars.  (It’s one of Mark’s best performances ever…it should win awards…)