Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

It's true! After about 19 years(!), today's posting represents the 498th so-called "sketchbook entry" that I've put on my web site. A month or so ago I was curious at how many I had made and realized I was closing in on that big number: 498. Hey, it's no more significant than 500, plus it occurs 2 earlier and I didn't want to wait...

Of course many of the entries here are not sketches nor even doodles. For example, this one was generated in Illustrator and the bulk of my time was spent figuring out how to make letters (or numbers in this case) 3D and look the way I kind of wanted them to look (there were a lot of ways to do that posted online). Many of the entries are photos and some are scans of things that are not drawings either. And from the start I intended the "of the day" to mean it's what I'm featuring on a particular day, not that I was intending to post things daily.

While looking through some old posts, I found at least two where I did not come up with unique file names for my images and clobbered them. I've noted them and will attempt to find them and rescan them in (as they were both actual sketches/drawings).

As for the drawing itself, it's kind of how I wanted it to be. I figured I'd put a sun in to "justify" the shadows, and the mountains in the background make the background a little less boring. The tiny figures were mean to just suggest human-ish shapes. Originally I drew them in red so I wouldn't lose them either in the white or black backgrounds, while I was making them, but it was kind of a painful red. I tried others and then realized the blue worked nicely againstthe shadow and the blue numbers. I hadn't really thought much about what would go into the speech balloons and it just so happens there are the same number balloons as there are tiny figures there, it was not intentional. And then as an afterthought, I added some simple shading to the mountains in the background It's somewhat subtle but improves it.