Fall down go boom

I want to get back into making character watercolors, and I've set my eyes on dear little Vincent. The problem with him is that he's so darn POOFY! He doesn't fit on my half-page sheets!

Solution: KNOCK HIM DOWN! I'm trying to the find the perfect klutz shot of Vincent to use, but I do believe I'm still searching. It is fun to draw him falling over again and again and again...

Here's to you, Mr. Background Character

As mentioned before, the upcoming bake sale storyline was initially slated to appear farther down the road. Inspiration striking when it did meant I suddenly introducing parents without first showing their kids. The result was a surprisingly early entry and starring role for Kaitlyn. Ahh, but Kaitlyn's good about these things. Once the storyline is over, she gracefully shows herself out and the comic is allowed to continue with the classroom turf war the same as always.

Kaitlyn's classy exit does open up the door for ANOTHER classmate from the other side to get a debut. To lighten the sudden new character onslaught, I could have had her talking to Roddy. To be accurate to Kaitlyn's relationships, I could have had her talking to Quincy. Instead, little Vincent will get his time to shine... and promptly disappear from the strip for a long time. I believe his debut shall end something like this:

Kaitlyn: Back to obscurity with you, Vincent!
Vincent: Aww, shucks!

So why Vincent? He's the most innocent on the other side; if hopes are to be crushed, he's the fitting victim. Also: Kaitlyn syndrome. It's just weird to use a parent without giving the kid, the far more important character, some face time.

You might notice there's some schlub in the sketch above. It's hard not to notice the guy, seeing as he's the subject of the post title. This dude is Vincent's dad, who doesn't even get a name. He is there to add some dude into scenes where no other dudes are willing to step up. He's a token. He's a background character.

Continuing my horrible blight of hetero-normative behavior, the PTA meeting is dominated by the mommies. Look, I am not Mr. Wonder Artist who is willing or capable to draw a full PTA meeting with a bunch of background characters. The only strip I've done so far WITH any background characters is the Black Friday bonus strip that isn't even on the main Precocious site. The parental speaking roles in the bake sale plot are all moms. In steps... some dude! See, some fathers do care about the PTA! Sky's talking to him! He looks totally out of place, but he is there because FATHERS ARE DEDICATED!


While he doesn't have a name, he does have some background information. Daddy Iddenstein is a single father who is trying his best to be a good parents. Life is hard, man! Not only is he the sole breadwinner, but he's also tasked with parenting a little genius who likely has undiagnosed ADD. (Vincent's more the scrambled-brain type than hyperactive troublemaker, so his crippling mental problem is charmingly benign!) Anyway, that's still not enough to buy him more than one or two panels without dialog. Back to obscurity with you! SOCIETY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BROKEN HOME/CHILD!

I had fairly loose goals when designing this dude. He needed to be canine to sire Vincent, COMPATIBLE SPECIES and all, and he shouldn't look too much like Vincent. The first sketch featured the backwards baseball cap, but was too obviously Vincent's dad. I decided to try again. The next sketch turned into a fox by accident, which would explain Vincent's look - but I wanted to go for canine variety. Then I decided to see if I could draw a droopy-eared doggie and still make it look male. (There's a reason I have only one character with such ears, and she's the militant girl power chick.) The result was the above sketch, which I think is quite nifty for a background dude. Only problem, he now looks NOTHING like his son. This is not important if he's just a background character, but it does eliminate the chance for readers to make the connection. It would have been a neat touch. "There was this strange fluffy canine father in the background of one strip, and now there's a similar-looking fluffy canine child talking to Kaitlyn. I get it!" Now... Vincent's dead mommy bust have been one fluffy, stripy bitch. See, it's one thing for the Et family to be varied - such fur pattern variations are common with domestic shorthairs. After doing 15 minutes of Googling, I have decided Vincent is a Keeshond, yet his dad looks like an English Setter/less fluffy breed mix. CANINE GENETICS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!

Oh, and those who have been reading this blog since post three or four (which is just me) is wondering if I'm going to follow up with my "rich lives of background characters" indicator that Dionne's mom was going to make an appearances. At the moment, she's been cut. Adding Kaitlyn in meant backgrounds will be omitted to accomodate dialog and the placement of small children. Heck, if I take a chainsaw to the arc and cut out a week - a strip with Sky pulling a "wall of text" to allow me to tie up logistical and conceptual loose ends is only interesting to me - there's a good chance my token dude's strip(s) get axed. I'm not looking into a play-by-play rundown of the story here. I want to get in, make funny jokes, gloss over the plot points and jump to the highly-amusing finish. I SEEM TO BE ENDING EVERY PARAGRAPH IN ALL CAPS!

The potentially-deleted strips also make jokes based on everyone understanding a character's personality. I've been dealing with these folks for years, so I know them. People who only read the comic (which is every reader but me) will only know these folks from the handful of strips in which they appeared. Good cartoonists know not to make these jokes until their strip is well-established. *I* made a joke based on Jacob's dad in the third friggin' strip. Jacob's dad makes his first appearance OVER A HUNDRED STRIPS LATER. Way to go, me! I mean, WAY TO GO, ME!

It's like a Rorschach test

After doing preliminary inking on the final 10 strips (only one of which is now completed), I needed to do *something* while the ink dried. I decided to give myself a challenge: draw all my characters in one strip with correct proportions. While that didn't go well, Photoshop did come to my rescue.

Once I knew I was a proportion failure, I decided to investigate silhouettes. The main characters all appear in cutout form at the bottom of each Precocious page. It's a nice effect, but the cutouts are based on the very first "official" sketches of the characters. I played around with the shapes, trying to imagine how they would appear. They say you've made it as a cartoonist when your characters can recognized by their silhouettes. I have not made it.

Things I learned, character by character:

Roddy: The placement of the ears means all fluff points are covered. Still, as he's a generic cat shape, the form is very recognizable. Roddy is the only character without a specific accessory, as he is distinguished by his black color. Bonus note: When I was inking Roddy, I discovered that he looked kinda good with his muzzle and cheeks not filled in - would it be too dramatic if I turned him into a black and white Socks-style cat? Hmm...

Bud: His Scottish fold ears really makes it hard to keep him in proportion with the others. Bud often ends up with a tiny head. When Photoshopping the sketches, I would drag one over the other, so Bud *technically* is close in proportion to the rest. His lack of upward fluffiness, however, makes him look more compact.

Suzette: The outline of her bell, collar, bangs, neck and muzzle all conflict horribly. Also, just like Bud, Suzette's ears going down tends to result in her being drawn as really tiny.

Dionne: Long hair tends to block out everything, so I had to work to find a way to keep the form visible. The result was a semi-twirl thing, which does look nice. Of course, I see Dionne in the outline because I know what Dionne looks like. Would anyone else figure out the character from that pose?

Jacob: I was worried his folded ears would look like a big block in silhouette, but I think he's decently recognizable.

Max: Both my doggies with big ears have the same problem. While normal drawing should show the back ear to fit cartoon logic, the rule does not apply in silhouette. I should have done a more direct profile. Max also needs more conservative fluffiness.

Tiffany is one I feared, because most of he quirks are hard to show in outline. I decided to try to give her a dynamic pose, like I did with Dionne, and the result was an abomination unto the lord. I would have been better making a direct profile with the braid adhered to her back. This pose make it look like a creepy third arm.

Autumn - Man, this bitch is HARD to draw in a way that would make a decent outline! Not only did I draw her facing left, which is difficult for me, but so many of her features conflict with other features. Argh.

Oh well, it was a fun experiment. It also took up my entire evening, which should have been spent inking. Whoops!

My god, what have I done!?

The thing about designing unique characters with their own set of physical quirks is that, when one is not paying attention, doodles end up being some unfortunate hybrid that don't match anyone!

It's all about the fluffiness! My cartoon characters all have some sort of fluffiness represented in their cheeks. Some fluff points are rounded, some are sharp. If I'm not sketching with any purpose, I let the pencil decide what I'll do. I'll draw the basics of a face and then decide which character is being drawn. Buuuut, the problem with lazy drawing is muscle memory seems to even things out and make me draw a face that is between the pointy and rounded. It doesn't match up well with anyone, so I either have to force it to be someone, use the eraser to correct the sketch to death or draw a random character.

This sketch went wrong early. It clearly wasn't a Bud, and the face was too masculine to be turned into Tiffany... so I decided to draw the "missing link" character between the two families. Shortly after I started I realized the missing link is not supposed to look like the kids, but like their FATHERS. D'oh. So, hey, fuck it, LET'S MAKE A CREEPY HYBRID OF MY MAIN CHARACTERS! It's highly disturbing.

To blather on, let me explain the subtleties of cheek fluff:

The general rule is kitty cheeks are rounded and doggy cheeks are pointy. It's the degree of the point that subtly differentiates between the characters.

Bud: His cheeks are the most obvious, as they are very round. The fluff *should* point down.

Autumn: Her cheeks are pointy and wider. They can droop a bit depending on her mood, but the normally pointy personality means normally pointy cheeks. Over time, I've scaled her cheeks back for cuteness, but we'll see how that plays.

Jacob: In theory his cheeks are the same as Autumn's, but his varies far more often. This is partly because it's somewhat easy to force my accidental hybrids into Jacobs, and partly because Jacob's impressionable nature softens his facial features.

Tiffany: This is probably impossible for anyone but be to notice, but Tiffany's cheeks and jaws are drawn with a different motion than the rest. In theory, she is supposed to have an angular jaw with smaller-than-average round points. In practice, they look like every other kitty's cheeks. Both lack of technique and affinity for cuteness bring her more into the norm. This does explain why I keep screwing up Tiff's jawline, at least.

Suzette: Of all the doggies, her cheeks are the most rounded. The motions for the basics of Suzette's face closely resemble Bud's. Suzette is also a good default for when I screw up a face, since the bangs and ears override everything.

Dionne: Her face should be halfway between Bud and Suzette. Since I need more cheek space for spots, the roundness helps.

Max: His cheeks should have Autumn's width and Jacob's slight rounding. I should note here that all my best Max drawings are accidental and that it's very hard for me to draw him on cue.

Roddy: Initially, the hybrid cheeks were meant for Roddy, but I'm starting to sour on it. If I'm not careful, Roddy's face looks fat because when a black outline is filled with black it stops being an outline and just becomes thickness. I'm trying to get around this by drawing him with the Tiffany technique. I really won't know what works best until I've put him down in ink a few more times.

If you're still reading at this point, I'm impressed. I find it fascinating that so much thought was put into what are nearly imperceptible variations in features - but this might only because I find *myself* so fascinating.

Did you get my best side?

So I've actually started working on my comic again. Shocker, I know. What thwarted me this time was trying to draw Dionne (and, to a lesser extent, Tiffany) in profile facing left. For some reason I just couldn't get her to look right!

Flipping through my sketchbook, the vast majority of my left-looking drawings all feature a three-quarter pose at most. True profiles are few and far between. And all but one were doggy characters. (It's not surprising Bud is the exception, as he is the most drawn character and thus gets to try more poses.) Weird.

Edit: My own blog defies me, as the sketchbook page I posed a while back contains a left-looking Tiffany I missed - drawn only because she was looking left in the comic I was working out, which is the same comic I mentioned struggling with today. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy or something! Um. SO TWO KITTIES! That's it!

I guess it has to do being left handed. I naturally draw my characters looking right since the flow of drawing fits the hand position. I know back when I did the very first Precocious promo pic I drew a great Bud looking right, but Autumn was a disaster. I finally had to draw her looking right and reverse the image in Photoshop.

Reversing characters doesn't always work, either. What looks so natural can become bizarre when flipped. How irritatingly quirky.

With sketching, my tendency to draw characters facing one direction is all well and good - but the actual comic features characters, y'know, talking to each other. That means lots of folk looking left. Uh oh. Some of them are even kitties! THAT'S BAD NEWS! (My guess is that kitties have more subtle features with the curves of their heads while doggie muzzles and fluffy cheeks tend to point strait out.)

So I went through my sketchbook counting figures facing left. Most were Jacob and Suzette. Jacob, being who he is, tends to be the character reacting to the more aggressive characters, so he appears more on the right side of panels. Suzette is easy to draw. The sketchbook is littered with aborted Autumn sketches, all given up when it came to drawing her hair.

What's pictured in this post is the one left-looking Bud in the book along with the better of the two fully-drawn Autumns. To show the crazy mirror effect works both ways, I flipped the image. Autumn especially looks distorted when facing right.

Oh well. It's just another hidden obstacle that keeps me from being a real cartoonist. Now that I recognize the problem, I've got to spend time trying to correct it in my sketchbook. This will not be fun.

Such commitment I have to my public

Hey, Dana! Whaddup?

So there's an option on this thing to set a post date and time. Since I'll be out of town without the internet, how can I meet my goal of one worthless post per day(-ish)? Let's see if this feature is purely cosmetic or not!

The sketches I'm sharing are for an idea for a Halloween strip, in which the kids swap their trademark looks. The best Halloween costumes are so in-jokey that those not in the know think you are either a fool or are not costumed at all!

Up first is the boys trading off. Who would think the swapping of hair styles would cause such massive cognitive dissonance. Bud's hair spiked and Jacob's part is just... unnatural!



Not pictured: The paintbrush my blank canvas characters used to paint my spotted/blotched/freckled characters' conspicuous traits.

Time to hit the "publish post" button and see when this thing appears. It it pops up tonight... eh, fuck it.

The new fashion for Fall! Er, Autumn.

It's the first day of autumn, so it's only fitting that I get to make that gag.

I'm been drawing Autumn over and over these past couple days, and I just can't seem to get her right. Granted, *none* of my characters have looked any good recently, but she was bugging me the most. If I get a nice face, I botch the ears. If the ears work, I ruin her mouth. If the head works, I suck on the hair. If it's fine from the neck up, I fumble on the body. (Those last four lines also double as a creepy poem.)

Amid all the chaos, my focus turned to the damned... SHOULDERS! I'm still no good at shoulders on any characters, but Autumn is double touch because her standard shirt has a collar. No hiding the details in a cute puff of chest fur like the rest, AND the collar often makes me give her 80's pad-enhanced shoulders. Add to that my inability to draw short sleeves (see: Autumn, Jacob, Max...) and I'm all about the frustration. Sleeveless outfits are where it's at!

So I started playing around with other looks for Autumn. As I can't draw to save my life today, only one sketch was deemed scan-worthy. Drawing Autumn in a normal shirt and pants is easier, but she loses her feminine mystique. Solution: SCARF FOR NO REASON! I might resurrect this look down the road, once the characters are established enough that I can switch up the standard clothing.

It can also start the inevitable transition into winter clothing. While I'm so behind the current strips take place in July, the time will come when the weather turns cold and the kiddies bundle up. I'm not saying I'm going for realism by any means. If I was, I wouldn't have all my characters running around in long pants despite it being mid-summer. (I draw shorts even worse than I draw short sleeves.) Still, it's fun to have a design set.

Edit: Here's another with Autumn in her (proposed) autumn standard. It looks more smock than sporty, but whatevs.

The Boys Wanna Fight

But those girls? They appear ti be happy to dance all night.

While they average out to a combative group (Bud, Roddy, Quincy, Xander = Fight. Jacob = Toss Up. Vincent = Space Cadet. Max = Filthy Pacifist.) the title is just me reaching for a song with "boys" in it to match the girls post below. Since I have been on a Garbage binge today, it was all too easy. Note to world: Version 2.0 is one of the best albums EVER!

The boys of the Poppinstock Academy 4th and 5th grade class, clockwise from top left: Bud Oven, Roddy Finnegan, Xander Upton, Jacob Linkletter, Vincent Iddenstein, Quincy Wozwax, Max Zeit.

Unlike the girls post, this was not an inspirational page where everything went right. Instead, my sketching has been rather icky the past few days, so I had to cherry pick. Xander and Vincent are OK (both sketches done the same night as the girls post, of course) and Bud and Jacob are within the standard deviation; but I'm unhappy with the other three. For one, Roddy is rarely that pleasant. I went through a day where I drew all my characters chubby for some damn reason, and this Roddy was the only one thin enough to scan. Quincy is *almost* there, but his nose should be shifted more to the right. He's a German shepherd but the nose placement makes him look somewhat feline. For Max, star of the current strips in production, I had tons of better sketches for him due to relevance. This one is rather weak, but the others were too good to fit in with the rest of this wonky crowd.

One thing I tried to do with this crew is line up the kids according to height. This mandated the separation of doggies from kitties due to ear discrepency. (It also meant using photoshop to shorten some sketches.) Bud's Scottish fold ears means he'll be the shortest no matter what, even though body-wise he's taller than both Jacob and Vincent. Roddy and Xander are average height for cartoon kitties, whatever that may be. On the doggie side, Max should be the clear tall one. Quincy is a bit too tall, but I was too lazy to fix it. Jacob and Vincent are both tiny (they're 9, while the rest are 10) with Vincent coming in as the shortest in body. Luckily for Vincent, he is a fluffy dude and his ears give him a boost.

Yes, this post is filler done only to keep the streak going. That is, unless you really wanted to know about cartoon animal height. If so, I guess it was fascinating.

Once more unto the breach

The first page of the new sketchbook is done. The cherry is popped. It is defiled by my pencil. No self-respecting collection of paper will have her now. Mwa ha ha ha.



There's nothing truly special about this page, but any artist would know you don't want to waste page 1 on something...experimental. You experiment in sketchbooks so you can keep your failures HIDDEN - who wants to be reminded of the sucking every time the book is opened?

Sure, I played it safe, but at least it's not *too* painful. Hey, even if the page is unremarkable, I still know what book it is because I wrote the date on the page! (What an auspicious day!) It only took me, uh, four years before I took my professor's advice to start dating my sketchbooks... even if I still only note the dates the book were started and finished.

My sketchbook etiquette overall is far improved. Last night I did an inventory: 17 sketchbooks completed in this modern era. I thought it would be more, but then I realized I had drawn on the front and back of pages for the first dozen books. (Revisionist history: I am now working on skethcbook #30!) This is an artist no-no - it's very hard to scan pages when they have the impressions of the next page on them. When I was still developing my style, this was helpful. It was like a slash and burn effort, obliterating my early work as I moved forward. Now, it would just be sloppy. It's still best to scan pages fresh, as graphite is a smudgy thing. This is such an uninteresting paragraph to anyone but me, but I made you read it anyway. Sucker.

Aaaannnnnddd... since I'm covering sketchbook pages, I would like to revisit one I posted for the heck of it a while back. Mostly I want to put proper labels in the post so someone could do a character search on this blog and find the image. Hey, I was on fire that day! Let the people know my awesomeness!



The mission of the day this page was created was to go Charlie Brown on my characters: BIG HONKING HEADS! My character proportions are already wildly inconsistent, so no one would know I did it on purpose. Now, if you're looking at the sketches and thinking, "their heads don't look so huge to me," that's the POINT! It ups the cute factor if done right. It's creepy as fuck if done wrong. Lord, I hope these kids are cute. The parents, I admit, are bit much, but it was fun to experiment.

Missing Persons

These are not the best sketches to show, but I wanted to cover a couple characters mostly ignored here so far.



Yes, it's yet another family portrait formed by combining various sketches that results in a strange scene. Why are the normally cheerful Linkletters concerned? Heck, even Harvey's smile is far too subdued for him! What is wrong? Well, tonight I am a shitty artist!

I thought I had inspiration, but then I watched a Wes Anderson movie. When will I learn that man is creative DEATH? The crappy painting I made while watching The Darjeeling Limited got rejected from the Mill show - even after I reworked it. Now, The Life Aquatic has sapped the joy from my cheeriest of characters. Wes, dude, you're going Tori Amos on us. You've reached the point where no one questions you... so no one tells you to EDIT YOUR SHIT DOWN! Tori's been making double albums...with about half the songs good. That's dumb, yet forgivable, because iTunes allows me to strike her failure from the record. I can't do that with a DVD, Wes. Stylish filler is still FILLER and it seems to drain my soul. AND THIS IS COMING FROM *ME* WES! MOST OF MY POSTS ARE USELESS BLOAT AND EVEN *I'M* TIRED OF YOUR SHIT! This is why Cracked wrote an article about why the movie didn't work!

Wow, that was... uh... unplanned. Oh well. Anyway, there's a poor version of Harvey Linkletter - but he's finally on here! Fun fact: In the post introducing Gene Et, I also had a image of Harvey Linkletter ready to go and fill in the final missing parent. All it took was one misclick in photoshop and I was left with... an image of Gene with Harvey's name on it. Whoops. Of course, I had closed out of Photoshop before I realized my mistake. I didn't go back because, well, that Harvey sketch kinda sucked too. The dude is just hard to draw! I have come to rely on cranial fluffiness to draw my characters...and Harvey is supposed to tallish, thin and *regular* animal fluffy. Deirdre must be noticeably fluffier! The fluffiness change throws my already weak proportion control out of whack. The silly oversized bow tie doesn't help either. Deirdre's sketch is weak too, but considering I just posted an awesome one of her below - even if she's missing feet in said sketch - I'm content that you know I *can* draw her well.



Suzette has only made one appearance so far, for a far different reason. While I'm total weaksauce in drawing Precocious parents, I've got Suzette down. Because of this, I practice drawing her far less - which means fewer chances of a fully-rendered Suzette working. (For me, having a character "down" is still equivalent to, like, a 10% success rate. Dammit.) This isn't the best Suzette either (again, I blame Wes Anderson) but her angry face is always fun - and far more common than the innocent look she sported in her other appearance here.

So, yeah, I seem to be posting whatever I can to make up for lost time after my tooth explosion. I even had another self-indulgent rambling ready for later... but Wes Anderson has ruined those for me. At least for today.