Say What?

OK, this one is pretty simple. Most of the dialog was taken verbatim from an email conversation with my friend Tania. Although this sort of thing would happen with some of my friends who are part of The Collective Frank.

This was a back-to-old-school style. I was given some pens and a pad of paper for my birthday and decided I'd put it to use. The initial drawings were sketches in pencil. Then I used the pens (4 different widths) to ink it. There were four pages, each with two images. Clearly, I hadn't really figured where the speech ballons would go and some of the lines on the frames end too early. I didn't care.

I scanned it in using the multi-purpose printer/copier at work, then brought it into Photoshop for processing the lines and then coloring it. I used Illustrator for the speech balloons. I was going to do some shading in Photoshop, but it's taken too long already, and the lines aren't terribly clean, and it's 8 panels which is a lot for me. Not sure what I can do to make it look clearer. I don't mind the shaky style for the more cartoon-y things, but ...

I tried to put some backgrounds in here, just to keep it from being too boring. The weird symbols on the battleship games mean nothing, I just wanted a way to distinguish the two players. Turns out the mostly invisible shading and gradients on the rollers on the chairs were the most complex elements of the picture.

The icy speech balloon was surprisingly easy, as was the shouty, spiky speech balloon.

My favorite frame is the second last one. I think it looks more than halfway decent, where the rest look somewhat less than halfway decent. There are many flaws I could have fixed but didn't care to spend the time doing so. And I'm not terribly satisfied with the final panel, as it seems a bit sappy, but I needed some way to wrap things up and ending at the second last panel would have left too much up in the air (the mood of the characters and more).

And of course this looks nothing like me or Tania. Hell, the characters don't resemble each other that much from frame to frame. Also, this is a bit of a departure from my ususal format of me being a complete clueless idiot. I figured that was OK, since in the end this is a joke about equality (of (warped) thinking).

Back to Frank's cartoon page.