Category: Cartoon

Oh my god, I think I just gave birth to twins.  Twin strips that is.

Please notice that while this week’s strip is THREE WEEKS LATE, it is also TWICE AS BIG.  And I got railroaded by a butt-load of work and the Princess’ kindergarten stuff.  For details on all of that, see my other blog here.

But at last this episode is done, and I can honestly say I still haven’t figured out how I want to draw this.  Manga Studio or Adobe Photoshop?  By hand or on the laptop?  All options have their advantages and disadvantages, and I’m seriously wishing that Smith-Micro would hurry it’s ass up and put out Manga Studio 4 so I could test it and see if the new version solves my current problems. But noooooooo! That would be asking a bit much I suppose. I’m only a heavy consumer of computer graphics programs after all.

So about the cartoon itself. This is something that has happened all too frequently to me.  I get a great idea while I’m out with the kids but when I finally make it home, ‘I got nothing,’ as Orziel would say.  I have learned to keep a notebook with me as often as possible, and I even have a handy little folding keyboard for my PDA, but none of those really gives me the freedom to write the moment the inspiration strikes.  Because I’ve always got to keep an eye on the kiddes, see? I look away for a few seconds and the next thing I know they’re tattooing someone else’s darling child with purple and green Sharpie markers.

But the writing does eventually get done and the inspiration is never completely gone.  It just goes into hiding.

The bastard.

To learn more about Orziel and his lovely boy-toy Jarresh, visit Mojocastle Press at http://www.mojocastle.com/demon/byday.html and BUY A COPY OF MY BOOK, DAMMIT!

Going to bed now…

I swear, I thought I’d never get this one done.

In an effort to find a more effecient way to do these cartoons, I tried doing the pencilling and inking the old fashioned way, on actual paper.  Both stages went very quickly, and I was extremely happy with the results.

Until I scanned in the inked cartoon, that is.  It did not look good when I went to clean it up.  Manga Studio gives me a very nice, crisp pressure-sensative line.  My pens do to, but they also bleed a bit on the paper, and that showed up very quickly on the scan.  So it took me a while to fix that little problem.

Then there was the matter of adding the screen tones to the cartoon.  You know, those little shades of grey I color with?  Yeah, those were a bitch.  I had to make them all by hand in Photoshop, and then the pasting in took lots more time than I would have prefered.  I did learn a few things in the process, which was nice because I’m still feeling my way around Photoshop, but man I was not satisfied with those tones.  Manga Studio has some very nice tones, and they look great when I paste them in.  My handmade ones do not measure up, I’m afraid.

The lettering and adding of word balloons did go much quicker than it would have in Manga Studio, and that has led me to the following conclusion.  For the next episode, I plan to do the pencils on actual paper, scan them in, import the scan into Manga Studio, and then ink them there.  Then the cartoon gets exported out to Adobe Photoshop for lettering and word balloons, because that’s one area where Manga Studio really falls short.  At least Debut does.  Not so sure about EX.  I’ll have to see.

And about what’s going on in the toon itself?  Those screaming kids in panel one are all part of my “mom posse” playdate group.  Patty and Mary of course are there with them, and yes, I have wandered off to capture story ideas on whatever paperlike surface I can find.  Writing on cheap fast food restaurant napkins sucks, by the by.  I know.  I’ve done it.

See you in a week, hopefully!

At long last, episode 18 is here! This week you get to meet Patty, another one of the moms in my posse (I don’t do MOMMIES GROUPS!).  Patty is pretty practical and has a solution for everything.  While she never said this line to me (actual credit goes to Alessia Brio, I think), this is something she would have said.  Her solutions are great, it’s just me and my freak life that makes them impossible to use.

This week, I handled the pencils the old-fashioned way – with an actual pencil and paper!  I found a drawing pad that was 24” by 8”, which equals a long, skinny sheet of paper perfect for sketching out four panel comics.  I’m still experimenting with the inking.  Will it be quicker to ink in Manga Studio or to do it by hand as well and then import everything into Photoshop or Illustrator for lettering and word balloons?  I’d stick with Manga Studio because it’s so much easier to handle toning and the pen tool gives such a nice dark line, but honestly, Manga Studio Debut sucks at handling text.

Manga Studio 4.0 comes out sometime soon, so I’ll check that out and make a decision then.  But I think I’ll stick with actual paper and pencil for the initial sketching.  That happened much quicker.  I’ve already got next week’s strip pencilled and ready to scan.

Enjoy the cartoon!

Oh my freakin’ god!  I thought I’d never get this one done…

Notice that there are FOUR characters in this week’s episode.  Notice how they are all be-YOO-tifully drawn and inked.  Notice how late this week’s episode is.

*Sigh*.  I’m working on ways to get these done faster.  Really, I am.  Meanwhile, this week’s episode features Jarresh (the young hottie in the loin cloth), another character from my e-book Demon By Day (http://www.mojocastle.com/demon/byday.html).  Yes, it’s shameless self-promotion.  Self-pimping, even.  But this week’s ep is also very true to life.  I spent many a play date pondering what I was writing while chatting with my best friend.  What can I say?  Mary is a fellow freak.  She understands my need to write porn.

Anyway, enjoy this week’s episode.  Hopefully, the next one will arrive a little quicker.

This has happened to me far too often.  There’s nothing so frustrating as having the whole story in your head and not being able to capture it.  That’s my best friend Mary on the bench with me, by the way.  She knows about all my writing woes, and yet she still puts up with me.

This is the real reason why we need four hands and two sets of eyes.  Multi-tasking is very important to us writer-moms.

By the way, this one took forever to draw – four characters plus all those seat.  Ugh!  It was worth it though.  That hottie in the passenger’s seat? That’s Orziel, the main character from my e-book, Demon By Day.

(Insert shameless pimping here!)  Demon By Day is available from Mojocastle Press.

This is also a true story, although Pixie wasn’t able to blow up the ‘balloon’ herself.  She asked me to do it instead.

True story! My youngest, Pixie, gets into everything.  And the results are maddening, but funny.

This one stars my best friend Mary!  She’s the nurse, the one who will give you a colonoscopy if you look at her wrong… Just kidding.  She’s really nice.  She puts up with me.

Playing for Keeps is a super hero novel written by Mur Lafferty, who also produces the “I Should Be Writing” podcast.  Both her podcast and the book are cool, so check them out!

Sadly, this one is also true.  My poor husband.  He really is an angel.