I love drawing Aileen et al. Love it.
But when it comes to my own cartooning, I can be a perfectionist. That nose doesn’t look quite the same from frame to frame? That hand isn’t working exactly the way I’d like it to? Put on another pot of coffee: it’s gonna be a long night.
Which means I’m happy with the artwork… but not with the fact that it’s taking so long to tell the stories I want to tell. The perfect isn’t just the enemy of the good; it’s the enemy of the GTD.
(Yes, I’m planning on turning that into a meme image. Probably with a cat. It’ll be ready in three months.*)
Meanwhile, a Canadian service called Bitstrips is enjoying some startling success, after years of slogging in the trenches. It lets you crank out a cartoon mighty quickly, once you take the time to design your sets and characters. And I’m taking it for a spin with DC.
Now, nobody’s going to mistake this for anything that’s been touched by human hands (and Cassie’s hip flask from the previous strip wouldn’t be an option)… but compared to never telling the stories I want to tell here at all, or telling them at a pace that gets “Would you hurry up?” messages from glaciers, I’m willing to put up with it.
(Set design, by the way, is currently on the fritz… hence the sparse minimalism of today’s backgrounds. Bitstrips’ sudden surge in popularity means the usual growing pains as a small company tries to scale up overnight.)
Let me know what you think!
(Hmm, Cassie has that damn “begging hand” thing going on. And I should have varied it from panel 3 to 4. Geez, did I get the colours right? Because the palette seems a little hot. Hang on, let me start again from scratch…)
