on illustrating LoF
Life of Fred is constantly testing my drawing skills. Like today, i'm drawing a baby grand piano with Fred playing on it. It's not anything i would normally undertake myself and that's why it's a test. And i'm passing. My drawing skills are always improving. It's not conceit, it's fact, take a look at how far I've come since the first strip. And it's embarrassing to say, but the first strip ever took me 5 hours to draw, and even so it was edited twice before going online. The drawing itself was easy, but situating the drawings and positioning the text so that they meshed well without too much crowding was something i had to learn to do. Now, granted, being able to draw the whole thing at once on the computer is beneficial to this process, as opposed to drawing on paper, scanning, editing and then adding text like i used to have to do. but a lot of it I still couldn't have done in the beginning even with the tablet and photoshop. A lot of it was a learning process.
So even though sometimes i shake my head in wonder over how I'm going to make a strip work, I always manage to figure it out. The strips still sometimes take me hours, like the one I've been working on today, but the quality in the drawings is a million times better. Whatever in the world would Tom do without me? :-p Well, he might have more time, because he wouldn't have a comic strip... oh well, sorry Tom.
So even though sometimes i shake my head in wonder over how I'm going to make a strip work, I always manage to figure it out. The strips still sometimes take me hours, like the one I've been working on today, but the quality in the drawings is a million times better. Whatever in the world would Tom do without me? :-p Well, he might have more time, because he wouldn't have a comic strip... oh well, sorry Tom.