Cameron Sees the Light

This, O best beloveds, is my very first attempt at a strip cartoon on the graphics pad and I have  to say that the result is rather pleasing on a personal level. Lots of faults, of course, but as a first attempt it has quite a few bonuses, which augurs well. It also gives me a personal green light to attempt another little project I have in mind.
As for the actual content... Harsh? Cruel? Grossly unfair? No, not me, the government.

Wotcher! Just call me Ozymandias.

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Well. I believe it is called hubris. Last week I was Crufts' Best in Show. This week I am a pariah dog, scavenging on the outskirts of humanity, whimpering for the love and affection of days past and receiving none. That object of fragility, my ego, has been shattered into a gazillion shards; each shard slicing and burrowing into a heart full of woe. Ummm. Where else can I go with this? I know. I'm proper fed up, me!
From the foregoing you may have deduced that I did not get a single point for this week's effort. The entire tragic history may be seen here. Which begs the question, why? What? It's crap? I don't think there's any need to be quite so brutally frank, but yes, there is some substance in that summation. To be honest, I think the main problem rests on the fact that it is essentially a lazy cartoon. My missus immediately said, upon seeing it, that it was out of proportion. True. The perspective is - well, non-existent and its basic premise has been done before and done better. As I was drawing this week's entry, I remembered that, years ago, Mad magazine did a feature called Monstrous Cliches. I think it was drawn by Paul Coker jr. but (tellingly) I didn't go and check. From memory I could recall "Driving a Hard Bargain" and "Meeting a Crying Need", but I was pretty sure Mad didn't use Nursing a Grudge, although I may be wrong.
The other main fault with this and other more recent cartoons is that I have been doing everything from scratch on the Bamboo graphics pad. I freely admit here and now that it is not a technique with which I am entirely comfortable. Given time and effort it may become second nature, but for the time being I feel happier, initially, with paper under my hand and a pencil in my fingers. I have no problem using the pad to "ink" scanned in pencils, so I think I'll stick with that method for the time being.
On to the next task, or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as a new cartoon.

Where Beer Does Flow and Men Chunder.

What a bonzer and apples week for yaws trooley, cobbers! You're only looking at the flamin' winner of this week's caption competition.
I actually had a choice of two to send in this week. The one I decided against involved Ned Kelly and a Dalek. Now, I fully realise that  sounds like an intriguing concept, but as you can see from the pre-clean up rough, I think Skippy was the wiser choice.

Whale Meat Again...

This is my entry for this week's caption competition. Now then, when the caption was first announced my mind went into white noise mode. Nothing coming through. No, still nothing. Nope, not a sausage. Wait! Wait a minute! The clouds are parting! I see shadowy forms. Fish! I see fish. A mackerel dressing up as a shark and... what a crap idea.
Come Sunday morning I thought this is going nowhere, then quite unbidden that footage of the killer whale taking a seal off the beach came to mind. You know, that footage. From that David Attenborough programme. The one with the killer whale on the beach. Yeah, that one. Well that came to mind and I rushed to grab my Bamboo pad. Everything, from start to finish was done on the pad. No preliminary pencils, just two books on the polar regions for reference and away I went. The result was that two people gave me their top marks and you can't say fairer than that now can you? Especially with your mouth full! Whatever happened to table etiqette?

Back Again, At Last!

A couple of months ago my hard drive kicked away its zimmer frame and gave up the ghost. Then, armed with a brand spanking new hard drive I had a few problems reloading my Bamboo and Photoshop. All the foregoing hastened my growing baldness due to me grabbing huge hanks of hair in my raging fists and yanking it out. Okay, that is not strictly true. In actual fact I scratched my head a little bit where the hair grows more sparsely than other areas, but the point is my idleness was enforced. The cartoon up in the top left-hand corner is the result of my fully functioning software (at last) allowing me to get back in the saddle. A bit of a wobbly posture on the leather to be sure, but the creative juices have started to flow again. HUZZAH! say I. You may not, but I don't care. Ner nerdy ner ner. This was my entry for this week's Cartoon Competition and there are some absolute crackers to enjoy, so please do take a look.
If you click on the above image... well, I'm not exactly sure what will happen. Time was the blog would open up a larger version, but that doesn't seem to happen anymore. I dunno, nothing stays the same, the centre cannot hold, as me old mucker, Billy Butler Yeats would say.

Dinosaurs in High Dudgeon

Would you Adam and Eve it (heh heh)? This is my entry for the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain's Weekly caption competition. Now then, on first perusing the caption Adam and Eve immediately popped into my aged and befuddled brain and it was Eve talking to Adam with that serpentine satan looking evil yet cool in the background. Not funny, just weird and vaguely disturbing. Then I thought, what if the first humings weren't even God's first choice? Hmmm, getting there. Who or what would have been His first choice? Big lizards! Pissed off looking big lizards with their arms folded. Well, it works for me.
A couple of sort of technical points ought to be laid out here. First up; God's right hand. As I drew it, it really worked. I think it is the best hand that I have ever drawn in my life. Now compare it to his left. Arrrgh! My only excuse is that I have always found that left hands are sinister. Ahem, yes - well, moving on. Adam and Eve's hands look ridiculous in comparison to God's. There is a very good reason for this. I am a bit thick. When I draw cartoons on the graphics pad for the competition I size it at 72dpi. When I zoom in to work on fine details everything turns into a Cubist experiment and I get a bit lost. There is undoubtedly a solution to combat this. I just haven't found it yet.
Onwards and , er, onwards.

It's Ella Fitzgerald, Dammit!

Okay, pay attention. This is going to take a lot of explanation. The cartoon competition was on a theme of America. The gentlemen in hats are 17th century Dutch settlers. The gentlemen in feathers are not. The lady on the right is Ella Fitzgerald. The caption is a line from Rodger and Hart's song, Manhattan. The Dutch settlers are buying Manhattan from the owners for a few trinkets. Ummm. That's it.
Procrastination is the thief of humour. Ella was a last minute insertion in order to indicate that the caption is a song lyric. It just doesn't work does it? Shame really, because somewhere, deep within the enfolding obfuscation, is the vague crumb of a good idea. Well, there is in my head, anyway (a confusing place at the best of times).
Not the best drawn effort on my part. Too much last minute rushing. What about the pencils? What indeed? To be honest, they aren't much better, but at least they don't include a badly drawn Ella Fitzgerald. Sorry, Ella. You deserve better than that. By way of recompense here are Ella and Louis singing Stars Fell on Alabama. It's the very least I could do.