Hey all! Got me a bit of a headache today, so the blog might not be super long.

It’s April in Canada and that can only mean one thing: NHL Playoffs.When I was younger I wanted nothing to do with hockey, even though my father tried to sign me up for hockey school. (it conflicted with Saturday morning cartoons, so forget that!). I’d say that I only really started paying attention when I moved to Quebec City for CEGEP. That first year I didn’t have cable so the only English channel I got was the local CBC affiliate and during the playoffs, well, there was hockey to watch and that’s it.

I’ve had the same favorite team since before that time, the Washington Capitals. They disappoint me just about every year (except that one time they made the Finals) but they’re my team. My runner-up team has varied. It used to be the (original) Winnipeg Jets, then it was the Calgary Flames and for the last three years or so it’s been the St. Louis Blues.

The Playoffs this year have been crazy. The players are going at it as though they had no respect for one another. There’s always trash talk, and fighting is something that isn’t going away, but the dirty hits are just insane. Concussions are the topic of the day and the players are playing as if they just don’t care. The League is going to have put on its big boy pants and start handing out suspensions before there’s nobody left to play. And that goes for the star players too. Sidney Crosby may be the most talented player alive today, but his conduct in yesterday’s game was reprehensible. The name on the player’s jersey should have nothing to do with it. If you do the crime, you do the time. The Philadelphia Flyers are no saints I know, but then they don’t pretend to be either. I expect better from Crosby because he’s the League’s golden boy.

There are the outdated old school diehards that defend this stuff but that’s only because they’re too dumb to realize the game has to evolve (yes Mike Milbury, I’m calling you out) for the safety of its players. Hockey can still be a contact sport, but you have to place boundaries.

In conclusion, go Caps! Go Blues! Try not to kill each other, AND to tie this all back to the site, this weekend I drew some Animus hockey players. I’ll be adding them to the artwork section shortly.

This weekend I did something I had not done before:

I sketched out my comic strips before I drew them.

Yes, until this past weekend, I would just draw strips straight off. As I draw them with a tablet, editing is easy enough. I can move things around if I’m not happy with them or I need to make space. The comic designs are simple enough that I never felt the need to sketch the strips out before.

What was so special about my first strip of the weekend so as to make me decide it would be a good idea to sketch it first? A number of things:

1. I had six panels to draw
2. I had a lot of text.
3. I had new characters to draw
4. Four out of the six panels NEEDED to show at least three characters.

The first thing I do when I’m drawing a strip is choose a panel layout. When I choose a layout for a strip, I need to look at which panel will have the most text and/or a lot of stuff going on visually. I have to choose a layout where that panel is the largest. With five panels, this usually works out well.  The hardest ones to layout are when the second of fifth panel need to be big (because then the first or sixth panel is usually too small). For the six panel strips I’ve done so far, I’ve found that my only choice was to have every panel be the same size, either 3X2 or 2X3. If a strip has simple visuals but a lot of dialogue, I’ll use 2X3 (there’s more vertical space for the word balloons), otherwise I use 3X2. In this case, the 2X3 panels were too narrow so I opted for 3X2.

I am not economical with my words. I find wordy dialogue more interesting (and funnier) than short dialogue. This means my text balloons have to be big to fit this wordy dialogue. To make sure the text balloons don’t cover up anything important, I’ll lay them down before I draw a panel. This way I know how much space I really have and draw my panel to fit. Sometimes at this point I’ll realize that there’s no way to fit the word balloons in the panels as I had intended. If I can, I’ll shift a word balloon one panel over (before or after depending on the case). If that doesn’t work, I’ll try to rewrite shorter lines. If THAT doesn’t work, I just do the best I can. Fortunately, I haven’t as of yet had to ditch a strip idea because I couldn’t get it to fit. For this strip I had to shift one line from panel 3 to panel 2, rewrite one line in panel 3 to be shorter, cut out one line from panel 4 completely, rewrite the remaining line in that panel and switch the order of the two lines in panel 3 to make up for the loss of the line from panel 4 to give me the most space possible to draw.

So now I was ready to draw. But I had new characters to draw. All three appear for the first time in panel 2 WITH Nektara. I didn’t want to commit to designing a character, drawing him fully detailed a certain size and then finding out I couldn’t fit the other three in and have to redraw the whole panel over. So I sketched each character on a separate layer and then shifted them around so that everything fit well. It worked so well that I sketched the other panels first too. And then the second strip of the weekend as well.

One thing I’ve learned in doing this, is that when I sketch I don’t have to worry about overlap. Nektara’s ears are not flush with the top of her head. Before, I would draw her head and then the ears on a separate layer so that when coloured, the line behind the ears would disappear. Now I just sketch the character out and when I draw the finished line over the sketch I don’t draw the line of the head that’s behind the ears.

To experienced cartoonists I’m sure this is all basic stuff, but I’m figuring this all out on my own. I suppose I could have read a book on cartooning before starting to draw the Funnies, but then I’d have had nothing to talk about this week.

Welcome to the Monday Blog…on Wednesday, written on Tuesday!

Tuesday’s strip inspired this blog and since it wouldn’t have been posted on Monday when my blog usually goes up, I decided to hold off on the blog until Wednesday. That’s how I roll. It’s my website, so I can do that.

But what was it about yesterday’s strip that I wanted to write about, you ask? The throw-away gag I included in it. Did you notice it? Go ahead and look again, I’ll wait.

*humming*

You saw it? Good, then you won’t mind sharing with the class. No? Okay fine, this little bit has gone on long enough.

It’s the book Nektara is reading, A Game of Scones, which is obviously a play on George R.R. Martin’s epic work, A Game of Thrones.

That’s it, you ask? Yeah, simple huh? I did say it was a throwaway gag, didn’t I? *reads back what was written earlier* Yes, I did.

Sometimes these throwaway gags are the hardest to come up with. They’re not integral to the plot, and some may not even notice they’re there. Why do it then?

To amuse myself. Drawing a strip is a lot of work (even if mine doesn’t always look it) and when you don’t get any reader feedback, then it can sometimes be hard to motivate yourself to continue. I think I touched on motivation in last week’s blog. Well, it’s just as true this week. Adding these little throwaways is an added challenge and if they get people talking, so much the better.

But why this gag? Well, Nektara was created specially for my friend, Carolyn. She’s a mega A Game of Thrones fan and I thought it would be nice to have Nektara be a fan as well, but of the Animus equivalent of that series.

But the gag didn’t stop there. I got to thinking about the world of A Game of Scones and came up with stuff that I don’t see that I’ll ever use in a strip, so I decided to share it here (you lucky folks).

• A Game of Scones follows the Main Houses in Peloros (Westeros) and their machinations to be the king’s baker.
• The Main Houses are Starch, Bannister, Marteau, Carafeon and Breyjoy (I couldn’t think of anything for Targaeryon).
• House Starch (Stark)  is in the North, their cookies are always cold.
• House Bannister (Lannister) are the king’s carpenters. Their pastries taste like sawdust.
• House Marteau (Martel) are masons. Their muffins are as hard as rocks.
• House Carafeons (Baratheon) have the finest vineyards in Peleros (Robert Baratheon is a notorious drunkard). Naturally, their danishes are strong enough to make a fur drunk.
• House Breyjoy (Greyjoy) are the masters of donkey riding (navigating the sea). Their biscuits look like donkey droppings.
• One of the major protagonists is Jon Dough (Jon Snow), the illegitimate son of Ned Starch. (Illegitimate children are given the surname Dough (Snow) in the north.)

Way more work went into this throwaway gag than it should, but at least I had fun!