Thanks for reading.

7/30/06

Recording the creative process Remember when I discussed logistics of cut-and-paste-for-effect? If I have a gag in which one, some or all of the figures are identical in two or more panels, I'll draw the figure/s once, scan it/them, and paste it/them into each panel where the character/s so appear/s. (Those are easy to color too - I just color the first figure, select the colors without the outline, and copy the color selection into the figure/s in the other panel/s.) If I have a gag in which some figure/s are near identical in two or more panels, I'll draw the figure/s once with all (and only) the attributes required for every panel, scan it/them, paste the composite figure/s into each concerned panel, and for each panel erase the bits that don't belong there. (Coloring these is more difficult, which is why I say cutting-and-pasting near-identical figures into multiple panels is probably more work than drawing each panel separately.) I'd thought of doing last Monday's cartoon as cut-and-paste, since the first four panels are the same two characters discussing the same subject in four different arcs. As I said before, when it comes to many merely nearly-identical panels, it's more work to cut-and-paste than to draw every panel fresh. For last Monday's, I wasn't up to the challenge. For today's, I didn't feel like letting my sloppy spontaneous draughtsmanship produce renderings of the car that differed enough between panels that they might distract from the gag. So I drew the car only once. In fact I drew only half of it and cut-and-pasted the half to itself, so it'd be symmetric. The seats behind the boys I drew seperately and pasted in. Then I drew the figures. I pasted them into each panel, and then I pasted the car exterior over them again. Then I realized there ought to be the inside of the car body; so I drew that into the dummy car exterior I still had, pasted that into every panel, and - having previously copied the whole cartoon onto the clipboard - pasted the seats, the boys, and the car exterior back into every panel over the interior. Think of it as "layers for MSPaint".

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Shortpacked, Scary Go Round, Tux & Bunny, Real Life, Peanuts

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Theater Hopper, Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Todd and Penguin, Pibgorn, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: AppleGeeks, General Protection Fault, Something Happens, Striptease, Achewood, Kismetropolis, The Holy Bibble, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, Anywhere But Here, Starslip Crisis, Questionable Content, Biggest Webcomic Loser, Schlock Mercenary, Narbonic

Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Irregular Comic, Bruno, Sluggy Freelance, Boxjam's Doodle

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Two Lumps, Zortic, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Home on the Strange, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Casey & Andy, Dandy & Company, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Megatokyo

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Medium Large, Station V3, Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Little Dee, PvP

Webcomics I read Sundays: Mac Hall, Smithson, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, No Room for Magic, 13 Seconds, Li'l Mell, Help Desk, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Whovian Observer, Gossamer Commons, Perry Bible Fellowship, Ctrl+Alt+Del

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Living Comic, Online Comics Day, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Comixpedia and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.