I haven’t done anything with Archy for a couple of years, so I think it’s time to bring him back. It’s time to see what else this artistic invertibrate can do…
Tag / Smith
Welcome to March
Congratulations, you got through February. You deserve this.
Judging by the comments I got for this strip, a lot of people needed their purr therapy.
February is the cruelest month
Another digital strip. I’m tending to draw the simpler strips digitally, and leaving anything that might have complicated or difficult elements to it to pen and paper.
Bloip!
I’m typing these blog entries on my iPad, and, wonderful as it is, is does have a habit of correcting my spelling when I don’t want it to. For example, I have to go back and correct the spelling of color to colour every time I use the word. Even the heading of this entry was ‘corrected’ to ‘Bloop’! Also, if you occasionally find a word in mid sentence that shouldn’t actually wardrobe there, that’ll be the spellcheck at work as well.
Feeling blue
This is the second of the all-digital cartoons produced on my iPad. I’ve sorted out the pressure curves on the brushes I intend to use the most, so I’m much happier with this one. You’ll be able to tell the difference between the pen-on-paper strips and the all-digital ones because the digital ones have straighter and fuzzier, panel frames but free-er, more brush-like artwork.
In an attempt to give this strip a chilly feel, I’ve colored it with my normal palette and then put it through a photoshop color filter to accentuate the cool blues.
Condensation
It’s winter – The house is sealed against the cold and every time I have a shower the windows steam up. This annoys Bella as she can’t see out any more, so she has learned to wipe her body against the glass to remove the condensation. Luckily, the real cat that stares at stuff hasn’t learned to climb onto our balcony so he/she can peer in on us. Yet.
Down the rabbit hole
I don’t know why the phrase ‘Oh my ears and whiskers’ suddenly popped into my head, but I’m very glad it did. After checking it was from Alice in Wonderland rather than Peter Rabbit, I was up and running.
So why am I going on about it being so cold? I think its because I’m doing weightwatchers at the moment, a combination of showing solidarity with Linda who’s been doing it since the summer, and weight management as part of my fight against diabetes. In the past four weeks I’ve managed to lose 12lb, but it’s also meant that I’ve been feeling the cold a lot more now I’ve lost several layers of protective blubber. And it’s been cold anyway.
Entirely digital
This is the first entirely digital Smith cartoon, drawn using ‘ProCreate’ on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. As you can see, the lines are a bit looser and more painterly, as I haven’t quite got the pressure curves on the pencil quite right yet, and the glass surface I’m drawing on doesn’t have the same amount of resistance as a sheet of paper, so the pen tends to skitter around more than I’m used to, but all in all, I think it’s not bad at all. The black and white artwork, once finished, was save as a .psd file, ported over to my iMac using Dropbox and then coloured using PhotoShop as normal.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to go completely digital yet – it’s taken me two months to get to the stage where I could consider attempting to draw this one but you’ll see digitally produced strips turning up every now and again. And when it gets to the point when you can’t tell the difference between an iPad drawing and a pen and paper one, then, we’ll be ready for the switchover to a completely digital workflow.
One neat thing about ProCreate is that it records your drawing while you’re doing it, and lets you export a video of the drawing process. Here you’ll see my first fumblings with the program – importing the grid structure in the background, drawing one set of frames at the wrong size, erasing them and starting again, pencilling, lettering and, finally, inking. Enjoy!
Card
I couldn’t resist the Sienfeld reference in this one. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Smoke signals
After whinging about the placement of objects in the last strip, this is one where everything went right. I was essentially drawing an abstracted version of the view outside my study window, looking over the St Helen’s estate and St Helen’s wood up to the top of The Ridge. Rather than cut and paste the drawing three times, something I only do when really pressed for time, I used tracing paper after pencilling the backdrop the first time and then transferred the scene to the other two frames using a graphite sheet. Then I inked in each frame separately. This ensures the backdrops look the same as each other but there are variations in the inking in each one, which stops the strip looking mechanical. I draw with a rather wobbly line so when they get repeated over and over again in one strip it can look a bit obvious.
The colouring is just right as well, mainly because I was colouring from life. I’m letting the snow melt as well, ready for the next round of strips.