I like how Big D’s expression turned out in the last panel. It perfectly captures his mood.

Phew, guess it was just Browny that they heard outside.

Or was it…?

I could’ve split this up into two seperate comics, but this is a scene that just works better when you throw it all together.

Wow.

I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m still sitting here awestruck that I just drew the above. I totally wasn’t planning to go crazy with the art; I wasn’t even looking particularly forward to churning this one out today (hence it was late), but as soon as I sat down, it just sort of…came out.

I started with Sarah in panel one, and right from the start she turned out exactly like I imagined, darting across the sidewalk with a sort of playful innocence and wonder. Women are pretty difficult to draw right, especially in a minimalistic style, so that was a big motivation booster right there.
Then I did all the backgrounds. I looked at two photographs for reference, but I made a case of it not to trace anything, or even copy it, I wanted to do this all by myself. So I looked at them once, taking in the general layout, and went to work. And it’s…I just can’t believe I really drew that. Everything just felt right.

This is what making comics is all about.

If you want to take a closer look at the art, you can click here to see it in it’s original size, or here for just the background art.

I enjoy getting a little philosophical sometimes, and it’s something that I want (harhar) to convey in my work more too. I’m a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes & Cat and Girl who both employ similar writing techniques. It’s hard work, but very satisfying.

Back to traditionallly drawn. Didn’t have a lot of time this week so this method is much quicker, and I’ve gotten to a point where you can’t really tell whether it’s regular or tablet-drawn.

True story.

It’s another fully digital strip! It was nice to have two days off this week so I could spend a few hours straight putting these together. I can imagine how much fun it must be to be able to do this every day when you’re a pro.

This is the first DD strip that was made completely digitally.
I was watching how Meredith draws Octopus Pie, and I was thinking I’d love to do it all digital like that. So I did. It took forever, but it turned out good. I think I finally got to the point where I can draw my characters just as well with a tablet as on paper. I was surprised at how good Nicole and Sarah looked on the first try. Now I just need to somehow speed up the whole process.

I also ‘fixed’ Nicole. In the past few strips she was starting to look more like a female version of Alphonse. Whenever I’m unclear on how a character should look, I refer to the cast image on the About page. I didn’t realize it when I drew it, but it’s become an invaluable reference for shapes and colors.

The update schedule has been a little wonky lately. I’m thinking of moving the Wednesday back to the Thursday, so it’s a little more spread-out across the week. And I’ll start inking again soon.

I noticed wrapping up this strip that I had forgotten to make gutters for like the last four strips. Oops.

My hobo caricature catalog is a little limited.

I’m liking these sketch editions. They may not be that flashy, but I can cheat a little bit on details by just scribbling a bit, and it still looks good.

Get your minds out of the gutter people!

Another sketch edition. For some reason I thought I’d be funny to give Big D a baseball cap. He seems like the sort of person who would wear that on his spare time.

I don’t know if that is actually an expression in English -the title I mean-. In Dutch, we say “duidelijke taal”. I guess it means unambiguous.

The ‘sketch edition’ thing is a bit of a joke. I just didn’t have time to ink and color it, so I just put it up as is.

Whenever I want to get real simple with the colors, I always end up trying something new or just spending way too much time on it. I wasn’t going to color this strip at all at first, but it didn’t sit well. It’s not really drawn for black and white, it needs color. I didn’t want to go grayscale so I tried out SinTitulo’s coloring style which I really liked. The panels aren’t set up very well for it, so there are some blending issues, but overall I like this palette. I gave the balloon outlines a brown color aswell so they wouldn’t demand too much attention over the art itself.

Concerning the storyline, I have no idea where it came from. I was going for something else before (and struggling with it) when this popped in my head. It was probably a combination of good weather, lingering story ideas from Ted’s Caving Page and The Mothman Prophecies, and listening to too much A Fine Frenzy.