There is an ongoing quest on my part to improve the design of my characters. Space Base 8, my comic strip, has been on the web now for ten months, and I am only just now starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of the look of the thing.

Cargo is a big problem. He is my main character, yet I am concerned that his design is not appealing enough. I would like him to be… cuter. He isn’t a cute character, but I really want him to be “better looking”. I hate drawing his body… the length of his arms and size of his hands, the proportion of his head to his body… this stuff all makes me crazy when I draw Cargo! I try to put him in dynamic poses while keeping his pose easy to understand, you know, “easy to read”, but this is so difficult. This is a problem animators have to solve all the time, and I do not envy them!

I have been drawing cartoons for as long as I can remember, and only writing jokes for about a year. So why does writing seem to come so much easier? Sometimes I actually dread drawing the strip. It must be because  I am afraid of hard work.

Guess it is time to take a break.

Three strips a diggity ding-dong week. Not seven, like Charles Schultz did with Peanuts for fifty (that’s FIVE-OH) years. Only Uno Dos Tres. Three. The magic number on Schoolhouse Rock. The number of fingers on most funny animal cartoon hands. Plus a thumb. Only three.

I started Space Base 8, my comic strip, at five strips a week, Monday through Friday. I had two months worth of five-day-a-week cartoons saved up as a buffer. I planned on keeping two months ahead. The last thing I wanted was to find myself drawing tomorrow’s comic strip today. What if I wanted to take a vacation? What if I broke my hand? What if I was hung over? I wanted a lot of comic strips drawn ahead of time for emergencies. I wanted a Big Buffer!

Well, sir, within two months I fell far behind schedule, and saw my buffer go from two months to two weeks!  I stopped posting to this blog, Monkey Always wins, because I needed all my time to draw the comic. That didn’t help much! No Bueno! Must have Big Buffer!

Things looked grim. Drastic measures needed to be taken, so I switched from five to three days a week, to lighten the weekly workload. GUH! That really broke my heart, because I wanted to get a lot of strips out there. I wanted to show I was a serious, prolific cartoonist. But at least now I could use the extra time, and rebuild the Big Buffer, right?

Wrong! Why are you so optimistic? Yeesh. “Half full”, my patootie!

I fell even further behind! Soon I found myself in living The Nightmare. Sunday night you could find me in the studio, putting the finishing touches on Monday’s strip. Oh no! Bad! More drastic measures had to be taken, And more heartbreak.

I switched to digital coloring. Zeus help me, digital coloring!

For more than one hundred comic strips, I had fully painted the original art of Space Base 8 in gouache. (I love gouache!) These masterpieces were hand lettered and  rendered in color, ready to frame. Truly beautiful to behold. Surely they would someday fetch a higher price than other cartoonist’s simple black and white ink scribbles! Scribbles that were later colored digitally. Reluctantly i decided to save time by computer-coloring my strips. At least now I ‘d have time to Big my Buffer, right?

Oh, I couldn’t fool you this time, could I?

Though digital coloring can be very speedy, I still could not catch up. I finally crumpled to the floor, a wiggly word bubble over my head containing just a scribble of exhaustion. I could not handle it.

So I took a week off. No new comics for a week. And yet I am still no further ahead than I ever was.

As I write this I still have not started Monday’s strip. I have not been able to do it. Big Buffer is still a dream. But I will not give up. My comic strip is what I have wanted to do ever since I was a kid. I have come too far to let it slip away. I am lucky that I still remember my dream, even though I’m and old guy now. I am lucky that I have what little time there is to do what I really love. And most of all I am lucky to have a fantastic and supportive wife who encourages — no, insists — that I get into the studio and get back to work on my comic.

So back to it!  Back to the desk and the computer! Back to three strips a week! And back to chasing the elusive, gilded trophy called the Big Buffer.

When I started to work on Space Base 8, my webcomic, I also started this process blog to document my trials and tribulations as I developed my comic strip. Gosh and gollies! I soon became so overwhelmed by the work of actually producing the strip, I couldn’t make time to blog about producing the strip!

It has been about six months since the last post, and boy, oh boy do I have stories to tell. So many discoveries and failures and changes and… and… aaaaannnnddd…

For example, I can tell ya about how I started out doing the comic five days a week, and switched to three… About painting the first one hundred or so comics with real paint and then switching to ink and computer coloring… About learning to use WordPress and how updating it caused headaches…

And I will start telling you abut them right away.

I mean in just a little bit.

I mean, um…

Soon. Promise!

Here is a gallery of early concept sketches for Meela.

Her character design was fun, But the real surprises came when I started writing her into the storyline. As I write this blog, her story hasn’t been revealed in the comic strip yet, so I won’t give any spoilers. But I will tell you that I now understand what writers mean when they say their characters take on a life of their own and it is the characters who tell the writer what is going to happen, not the other way around.

Read the comic strip and find out what happens, and come back to the blog and read more about my process!

Okay, I guess Disneyland is not really the real world. Let me start over.

I have a real job in the Magic Kingdom, believe it or not.

No, still not right. Once more…

I have a phoney baloney job at Disneyland, believe it or not.

Nope, that is totally believable to anyone who knows me. Can’t say “believe it or not”. Let’s try again.

I go to Disneyland a lot and I draw and color things.

Yeah. That’s more like it.

Go here! Look at the bottom of the page. click on the pictures to see some stuff I made for Disneyland.

Then go here! Read my official Disneyland biography.

Thanks for following directions so well. You will go far in life, I can tell.

Go to spacebase8.com. Read the comics. Ignore the infant-stage website design. Enjoy the comics!.

As I write this in the wee hours of June 2, there are two strips posted. June 1, 2009 is the official first posting date of my comic, Space Base 8. June started on a Monday, so I thought it would be a nice, clean starting point for my weekdaily strip to start on the first of the month, on a Monday.

Wow, I did it. I started posting my comic. I have been wanting to do this for years. Whew!

Yay!

Like this one! They are a bunch of kids, see, and they are cute, see, and I like Harvey comics like Hot Stuff and Richie Rich, see? So I wanna draw some kids in a a style inspired by Harvey’s style, and they are gonna look like this, see?

and then there is this one, too…

…and this little girl seems to be exploring something spooky, a la X-Files or Nancy Drew…

Oh sure, I spent all of yesterday drawing these kids instead of working on Space Base 8. Oh sure, now I am two days behind schedule. Oh sure, I want to start posting Space Base 8 in about a week or so…

But aren’t these kids cute? Don’t you want to see their adventures? So do I. I can’t wait to create those adventures for them. Someday.

Don’t end a sentence with a preposition, you say? You say I should have asked, “With what am I gonna draw it?” Well, I say no one talks like that, and if they do they get beat up a lot. Besides, I think that sometimes a preposition is the best thing to end a sentence with. 

What am I gonna draw it with? I have struggled quite a bit with that. I want to be able to sell the original art from the strip, so drawing it digitally on the computer won’t work for me, since there wold then be no real tangible artwork to sell. Traditionally, comics have been done in ink on bristol board. But I wanted my comic to have a unique look, more than just black ink on white paper. I wanted my comic to have broad areas of black, gray and white, rather than the traditional black outline on white background.

                        I wanted something more like this:

                                          …and less like this:

Since I love to paint with gouache (see “Rhymes With Squash”), I first tried doing ink outlines and coloring in between the lines with gouache. The results were fine,

but it took too much time to color inside the lines without painting over them. I am proud of my lines, and they are an important part of the “look” of the strip, so no covering up allowed.

Then I tried doing an ink wash over my lines (A wash is ink diluted with water to make it a transparent gray). I was not happy with the splotchy results:

I still thought that painting with transparent color would be the best way to go. I tried different inks and watercolors, airbrush paint, transparent acrylic inks, Dr. Martin’s watercolors, regular watercolors, etc.! All were not satisfactory for one reason or another.

So I went back to gouache, love of my art life. See how pretty it looks? This is just how I want my comic to look.

Too bad it is so fussy a paint. So fragile.

Then I found Acryla brand Acrylic gouache. Acrylic Gouache? That is an oxymoron! Make up your mind! Is it acrylic, or is it gouache? Well, it is a bit of both mixed together. Not as gummy as acrylic, not as fussy as gouache. Dries matte, not shiny like acrylic. Dries permanent, not fragile like gouache. You still have to mix exactly exact the exact correct amount of water into it, like gouache. And it gets icky and gummy when it starts to dry out on your palette, like acrylic. But it is kinda fun to work with. So, as I said at the end of my post, “Rhymes With Squash“, I changed my mind. I was switchin’  ta Acrylic gouache!

I’ve used it for two weeks now, and…

I’ve changed my mind again. I miss real gouache. I just love the way it feels when I paint with it. Acrylic gouache is not as opaque as the real deal. too transparent. I gotta do multiple coats. and it still looks a little splotchy, see?

SOoooo… gouache, if you are listening, please forgive me. Take me back. I will first paint the broad areas of color with you, Gouache, then do my ink lines of top of that. I will still keep acrylic gouache around for some things like painting  big black areas, which it does pretty well. But for brush flow yumminess and opaque one coatness, I just gotta pick regular old gouache. Gouache, gouache, gouache. Gouache, I love you. Hugs and kisses, Dave.

Great googly moogly!  the  hardships I went through to get this done. And most of the hardships were brought on by trying to do things more efficiently.

First of all, I decided that since the strip is mostly colored black, I would paint it on black paper, therefore saving myself the inconvenience of painting all that black space around the character and stuff. This turned out to be more hassle than it was worth, because I spent a lot of time being so very careful as I painted inside the character and  stuff. To paint inside a tiny character you must use a tiny brush which does not cover much area at all, and so takes lotsa time. Plus, the paint I use is not as opaque as I would like, and it took multiple coats to keep the black of the paper from showing through. Ugh. 

I then pasted the black panels onto a white board, so that it had a white border and all. Cutting and pasting is fun, like kindergarten, but costs time. Valuable time. I am trying to get a week’s worth of work done in a week, after all. And failing miserably!

Lastly, I decided to make a change in the art. Lookie here at my rough draft:

See the swooshy lines that show the path the ball took when the robot threw it? Once I painted them that way, I didn’t like it. I decided a dotted line approach would be cleaner and fit the graphic style of the strip much better. So before painting new dotty type lines, I painted over the old lines with black paint on the black paper. But the paint and the paper are not the same color black, if you can believe it, so I had to fix this with photoshop once it was scanned. More extra work. (The dotted lines rock. I love them.)

SOOooooo…

Next time I make a strip with a lot of black, I will just take out my black paint and a brush, and paint it black.

It is a type of paint. It is also called opaque watercolor. It is also sometimes called bodycolor, but sometimes bodycolor means a different type of opaque watercolor. Sometimes it is mistakenly called tempera, but it isn’t tempera. It is gouache.

It is more fun to say “gouache” than any other nameofapaint. It is more difficult to read the spelling of gouache than any other nameofapaint. “Casein” is another difficult to read nameofapaint.

I made up the word, “nameofapaint”. Copyright 2009 David Scott Smith.

Wikipedia says, “Gouache (rhymes with “squash”), the name of which derives from the Italian guazzo, “water paint, splash” or bodycolor (the term preferred by art historians) is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. Gouache differs from watercolor in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk is also present. Like all watermedia, it is diluted with water.^[1] (Gum Arabic is also present as a binding agent just like in water color.) This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities.”

Wikipedia should always be pronounced, “wi-KEE-pedia”, and never, “wi-KUH-pedia”. Or I will slug you.

Gouache comes in tubes, like little toothpaste tubes. But don’t brush your teeth with it because it is the opposite of toothpaste, as it will filthy up your teeth and not whiten them, unless you use white gouache. And  not even the white type tastes like peppermint (This I know from experience. Never get so drunk as to brush your teeth at your easel.) It comes out of the tube in a similar consistency to toothpaste (see warning above).

You mix water with just out-of-the-tube gouache to make it the correct consistency for painting. Don’t mix in too much or too little water, or you will ruin your painting forever. I am not kidding. This is not some sissy’s paint! You want to paint from a hammock and sip an umbrella-fruity-drink while someone fans you with a palm frond? Then tiptoe to Michael’s and buy some liquitex, you milksop. And you, put down those colored pencils and learn to paint with a brush like an adult.

Gouache contains a very high concentration of pigment, which makes its color very vibrant. This is why art school students are forced to use gouache in color theory class. Art school students usually get frustrated trying to get good results with gouache, and end up hating it.This is because they try to paint with it as if it were oil or acrylic. Gouache is not oil. It rhymes with “squash”, not “mohel”.  You have to use a methodical technique if you want to get flat, even coverage when painting with gouache. Start at one end and paint toward the other, without going back over where you have already painted. If you paint back over semi-wet painted areas you will leave blotchy spots. And like I said before, learn to mix in exactly the exact perfect exact amount of water, or die a fiery art death.

Gouache is delicate. When dry, it can easily get scratched. A gouache painting can discolor if it gets wet. You should not roll a gouache painting like you may with an oil or acrylic painting on canvas, because gouache is brittle and will flake off .

Gouache is usually painted on paper or paper based board. It will not adhere well to canvas or other non-porous materials.

This gouache sounds horrible, you say? What in the world is so good about it, other than its name? Alright, I’ll tell you if you promise to stop texting for just one single minute and pay attention to me for a change. 

Gouache is opaque. That means it is the opposite of transparent. This is why gouache is also known as opaque watercolor, as opposed to transparent watercolor, which is actually translucent, not transparent, but you get the idea. When applied a certain way, most colors of gouache lay down on the paper in a very thick, rich, opaque kinda way, with a velvety chalky kinda matte finish, not in the least bit shiny. This matte quality makes it superior to oils and acrylics for reproduction. A camera or scanner won’t have to deal with shiny reflection spots on a gouache painting. 

As I said before, the color you get from gouache is amazing and beautiful. So rich and vibrant. Deep blacks, bright oranges, dazzling flaring up in your face yellows! ZZZZZZZing! 

Gouache flows, just fuh-lowzzzz off the brush. Touch the brush to the paper and see the mark appear there. Now move the brush and the paint just pools perfectly where you direct it. Use a pointy brush and gouache is your line-making love slave. Long luxurious loveslave lines. Perfectly opaque. Vary the width by varying pressure on the brush. Lonnnnnnng lines. Try that with acrylic and you get short gooey lumpy goo lumps of varying goopacity. 

I love it. Love gouache. Love it. That is why I decided to use gouache when making my comic strip, Space Base 8. Historically, most comic strips have been done in ink. More recently, webcomics are often done digitally. I decided to use gouache because I love it and I wanted to use it every day.

Then I changed my mind.

But that is a different story for a different post.

Now gouache your hands, there’s paint on them and you’ll get it all over the couch.