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Congrats! Love the little cartoons. Were those done with the aid of Illustrator/Freehand or are you using some fancy iPhone/iPad app for that?

Thanks!

 

Sounds like a cue for a mini-how-to...

 

Everything was sketched out as individual elements on paper. I've been trying to loosen up and start drawing again, so I decided to just go as sketchy with this as I could, just to get something going. I used a couple of different shades of blue erasable colored pencils, since it's easy to go back in and refine the sketches. With graphite, there's only so much erasing you can do.

 

 

 

 

Instead of re-tracing the drawings with graphite like I usually do, I just used the black & white adjustment layer in Photoshop to knock back the lighter blue, to give me something a little cleaner to work with in Illustrator. All of the rest of the work was done there.

 

The house sketch was particularly rough. I didn't feel like spending a lot of time sketching it out, since the characters were all different sizes, and everything would have to be tweaked to fit anyway.

 

 

I ended up just using it as a guide more than anything, and drew most of it in Illustrator. I threw the characters in there in Photoshop first, to make sure they'd fit.

 

 

The hardest part was the "kicked out" drawing. I made a bunch of attempts at that which I wasn't happy with. Most had Sallie shaking her fist defiantly (note the multiple erasures of her other arm, trying to figure out a decent pose). But that just didn't have the finality I wanted. And it didn't look funny enough.

 

 

In the end, I came across the idea that she needed to be face-planted on the ground. First, because it was funnier, and second, because it was more therapeutic. Also, I increased the distance between her and my foot, because it looked funnier, and also got her farther away from me.

What you should have done is overpaid them by 25 cents so they'd have to issue you a refund check. And then, wait until the last few weeks the check is valid, then endorse it over to someone in Nigeria.

Yeah - that would've been fun. But I'm just glad to be over and done with the whole thing. Knowing that I'm not paying a huge pile of interest they were counting on is good enough for me. Besides, they would've found a way to charge me an "issuance of refund check due to overpaying" fee, that would've put me back in debt.

I used to draw a comic called "Blue Collar Cleanup"- A dragon working in maintenance in a huge grocery store and dealing with a-hole customers, managers and his boss. It was my outlet for working in, you guessed it, a supermarket. Cartoons can really be a way letting off steam to those who treated you like garbage.