The Last of the Dogs

I'm pretty sure this is the last of the Squash and Stretch Dogs. Phew!

 Is it me or does he look like Hitchcock in the one above?

This next one went smoothly, except the eyes looked wrong until I put the eyebrows on them.

Sorry for the thoroughly uninteresting post.

Coming up: Popeye theory, Basic Construction Heads, the next Preston Blair lesson and more original art.

Clint vs. Chuck

A while back me and a friend had a really geeky argument about who was the bigger bad-ass, Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. I say argument but it was friendly, I'm glad I have friend to have these kinds of discussions with.

My point was Clint is completely bad-ass in his famous western pictures, like A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More, the Good the Bad and the Ugly, Dirty Harry (You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?), Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven which I saw for the first time recently and was astounded by.




Plus this scene in Rango was about the coolest thing I ever saw:

My friend on the other hand only knew Chuck Norris from the internet jokes. You know the ones; "The Boogeyman checks under his bed for Chuck Norris". Knee-slappers like that.

The only thing I know he was in is Walker Texas Ranger, which I haven't seen. And that awful self-congratulatory blowjob of a movie Sidekicks. Yeeesh!

Me-clearly-winning-the-argument aside, I drew a cartoon demonstrating my feelings about the hypothetical situation. I saved at various points so you can see the steps in progress.

I started with the big forms first using thick lines. There are some smaller forms and wrinkles I should've done later in the process. I'm trying to be more methodical and logical each time I do these tablet drawings.

I started in on the secondary forms, hole in the hat, the horse-shoe marks on his ass and the basic facial features. Notice how on Clint, for example, I just did the eyes, nose, mouth and main eyebrow. I didn't immediately do the bags under the eyes, the scowl lines and the forehead wrinkles.

This is where I add the details, spots, wrinkles, ribs, seams, hairs etc. I tried to draw these details with smaller strokes than the major forms they inhabit. Not sure if you can see that, it's difficult to get real contrast in brush sizes with my tablet.

In a layer underneath the line work, I lay down the main flat color fill areas. I used Flash all through high school, so this sort of fill-everything-with-a-flat-color is what I naturally tend to do.

I also do the flat colors for the background and add the speech bubble.

A few background details but the main part of this step was the rendering and texturing. I find this step the hardest because as I said, for the longest time I've been doing the Flash thing of simply filling areas with flat color.

It's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. I don't want the image to have no texture and be flat but I also don't want to just add slightly lighter and slightly darker tints to every area of color because then you get that monochromatic shiny airbrushed look you see on all the cartoon dvd covers.

Anyway, I did some magic photoshop swooshy-woosh tricks to the background and this was the finished cartoon:

For the eagle-eyed in the audience, yeah I nicked the color scheme from Buckaroo Bugs;

It's lowly to steal color schemes, I know and I do it more often than I'm proud to admit but I'm no good making color decisions. I'm not up to the color theory part of Johns Curriculum blog yet, I'm still at basic character construction (more on the way btw).

Anyway, the joke is supposed to be the horse kicked Chuck to the ground and Clint shot a hole through his polecat hat using his finger and the sheer power of masculinity. Then he asks "Chuck Who?"

Did anyone else notice I made his belly yellow?

 PS. Happy 100th Post to me! The Dancing Chicken officiates my 100th Blogpost

Something More Interesting Than Squash and Stretch Dogs

The title was admittedly a little misleading. Here we have the smiling dopey dog.

The cheesey grinning dog.

The wry dog. Is wry the word I'm looking for? This expression was a hard one to put in words.

The goofy listening dog.

The barking dog.

I'm enjoying how smoothly this process is going! Expect the last of these soon.