Q: You’re starting a webcomic?
A: Uh, yes. Hence the title of this thread.
Q: We always knew you were a sarcastic mother hubbard but… you can DRAW?
A: I can doodle and cartoon my ass off. This does not always mean I can actually draw consistently, or to the standards of professional syndicated cartoonists, caricaturists or illustrators, though. But I figure I’m better artist than HALF the webcartoonists out there, and a better writer than two-thirds: everything else is a matter of effort, equipment and degree. I’m okay now, but I’ll get better.
Q: What’s your webcomic about?
A: Contrary to expectations, it will not be a funny racial diatribe about my observations of African-American assimilation in 21st century America. That’s probably another strip. This one is a more pop-sensibility and all-ages oriented. It’s called “Season’s Greetings.” It’s about an old woodcarver named Nicholas who lives in a magic castle in the North Pole with a bunch of elves and special creatures making wooden toys.
Q: Oh! So “Season’s Greetings” is about Santa Claus?
A: It’s about an old woodcarver named Nicholas who lives in a magic castle in the North Pole with a bunch of elves and special creatures making wooden toys. How’d you get “Santa” out of that? :dubious:
Where can we see it? Here, at Photobucket. By the way, props to Amazon Floozy Goddess for tipping me to this website when she posted those Doper anagram caricatures back when.
Don’t you have your own website?
Not yet. Can’t afford it. Maybe someday. If anyone has any free hosting ideas for webcomics, I’m all ears. I’m waiting for a slot at whatever Keenspot is now, but I haven’t heard back from them yet re: my application. I’m afraid of being on a site with 8,000 other webcartoonists will get me lost in the shuffle.
Who’s “Uncle Moe?”
The name I’m known by off-board by my nephew and niece. I rashly promised my sister when she had her first child that I’d use that name if I started writing/drawing children’s books… this is me secretly keeping that promise.
I have other things I’d like to say, but I’ll wait until I read some responses.
That’s the last one … Hit submit too soon… phone rang…
Okay… I need to work on these some more, obviously. My sense of design is all over the place, my sense of character is a little off, there’s a certain static monotony to some of the imagery and jokes, calligraphy and design I still need to work on.
Some of this will be resolved when I can afford some decent graphics software. I envision this strip being a combination of pen and ink and computer assisted coloring.
I’m also allergic to straight edges and straight lines. Anything you see like that is the result of me using a box tool over finished artwork.
That said, I wanted to hurry up and get started because I feel with feedback I will improve. I’m basically self-taught cartoonist, excepting one arts class in high school and a fine arts class in college.
This was originally supposed to be in color, but the only coloring program I have is the Microsoft “Paint” software and I’m not thrilled with the coloring options.
Nice start Askia, I could see where this could be pretty good. I liked the cast of characters. Why no Turkey or Baby New Year? Will they be added later?
BTW: Are you aware that you can double click any color in MS Paint and then define a custom color and get any of about a million colors? You can also go to the Colors Menu item.
Johnny Hart’s B.C. did the sacrificial turkey joke for years, and I didn’t see where I could do anything new with it, whereas I have very specific character ideas for Cupid, Ground Hog, E.B., Veena and the rest.
Old Year / Baby New Year would be by definition recurring characters. I imagine they’ll show up.
Here’s my experience with Paint, but maybe I need to refine my scanning technique or buy some peripheral tools something: whenever I use the “Fill with Color Icon” there are all these irritating little bitmap squares that don’t get colored in, necessitating me having to go 8x to fill in each square ot make the image look right. When I originally scanned and colored these 18 images, the first six cartoons took a whopping twelve hours to get to look “right.” Now some of that was just getting the color palatte balance right, since it was my first time using a color graphics program, but I hated, hated, hated all that dot detail mouse clicking.
:dubious:
