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.