First off I went on hiatus for a few weeks to recenter my interest. Secondly I am trying to redesign the website. Thirdly I wanted to practice a new style.
On the first topic: the hiatus came after I changed up a very pivotal apparatus of my mind. I started a medication that really made my brain change in not such good ways. This effected hundreds of important things over all my life. My comics suffered for it and I found myself unable to actually finish anything I was working on. The worst was that I was completely unable to focus on getting anything done let alone sit infront of a computer for three hours to write draw and post each strip. Since I am still a new cartoonist a single cartoon can last about 3-4 hours each day I work on it. From finding the headline to sketching it out to drawing it to putting it on the site and writing about it. So I need to have a sort of focus. I found that I was not in love with the process because it felt like torture to do anything for that long. Even if I liked it. So I stopped liking it and things were just not fun. So I wanted to figure out a way that I could get things back to good. Which brings me to my next point, the redesign.
I think I watched a Frasier episode and it said to make your home your castle. No wait it was a Simpsons episode. You know the one where Moe loses interest in bartending and goes back to his college to talk to his dying professor. Meanwhile Homer takes over the bar. The professor tells Moe that he should love where he works so Moe redesigns his bar to a po-mo club bar. I will not be turning the website into a po-mo clubbing site, but I am trying really hard to make it into someplace I would like to go to on a daily basis and just check it out. The look so far in my redesign is flash based. and here is the segue into the new style.
I decided that I love the look of flash. I used to draw in it all the time and it really fit my style. But I found that I have gotten used to drawing with AI and PS so it has been a hard road trying to figure out how to draw right in flash. The main point of it is that your first sketch is pretty much your last, as redrawing in flash like you would in PS is nearly impossible due to there being no pixel sizing on the brushes. They are all relative to the zoom you are currently at. I feel that is its biggest failure and if they could make it so you have pixel sizes then it would be the ultimate program. In my opinion.
So those are the three things I am currently working on during this working vacation from the strip. I will keep you updated with where we are going and when we are going to be done. In the mean time, remember to check out ToolsComics.com drawn by my good friend James Kuhn. He will surely entertain with his very professional news paper comic strip updated Monday Wednesday and Friday.
