Dated obnoxious title? Check! Let’s blog it up!
I hope all of you neighbours down south enjoyed your July 4th weekend! My July 1st weekend last weekend was nice and of course it was capped off with the 300th strip of Animus Funnies! How great is that?!
I wanted to do something special for strip #300. A commemorative strip on a character’s birthday? Obviously that meant Todrick needed to get caked. But what could I do to go the extra mile? Draw every character I’ve created so far of course! I settled for just the characters who have actually appeared in the strip, so even though Copley was originally supposed to be a member of the cast, he didn’t make the cut. Other characters I’ve drawn for the site, like Pepetus, Enzo and Teeper have likewise never appeared in the strip, so that’s why they were left out as well.
The trickiest part was deciding what to do with Horvath and his crew. I’ve already softened up the Pickle Patch Bandits a lot since their first appearance so I didn’t mind having them hanging around with all my other characters. Horvath’s crew are still in full bad-guy mode. It made no sense having them there, but I couldn’t really say I featured every character if they weren’t, right? Them appearing on Wanted posters was the most clever way I could think of to feature them.
On Facebook I said that I didn’t draw Marv and the other potatoes of Clan Tater and Clan Spud because if you see one potato (Bud is in the Wanted posters), you’ve seen them all. That’s definitely true, but honestly, I plum forgot them. Bad Guy Bear and Battle Marmot? I could’ve drawn a comic book lying on the floor with them on the cover, but the thought never occurred to me until the strip was already posted.
Other little foibles that I didn’t notice until it was too late? Nektara has no shadow. It’s not because she secretly became a vampire. I don’t know how I missed it though.
Red Rich was intentionally left out of the version that appeared in the strip since he arrives in the second panel. I just saved a copy of the picture with his layer hidden.
As for the drawing. As always, I started with a pencil sketch on several layers. I started with Barnaby and Raz and worked my way around. For a picture like this I find it helps to draw my tallest character first so I know how to size everybody else accordingly.
I inked and coloured each character separately. The exceptions were the characters in the window who were all draw as one element, and the characters who were riding other characters (Zoë, Zouly riding Popkin and Skitter riding Mouser).
When at least each character was drawn, I created a simple two tone background and then comped each character roughly where they were appeared in the original sketch. I repositioned a few to tighten things up a little since I spread the characters out in the original sketch to draw everybody in their entirety (except for the characters outside the window).
Because they were originally flying behind Barnaby, Zoë, Zouly and Popkin ended up smaller than I liked. I enlarged their layer and moved them around several times before settling on leaving them in the corner. Their shadow is supposed to establish that they’re about to fly above Tomaw and not the tinkers by the window.
As I was tagging the characters in the strip, I realized that I hadn’t tagged the octopus in his previous appearances. I decided to name him Sherman, because what else are you going to call an octopus?
That’s all the blogging I’ve got in me for this week. Have a good weekend folks!