Hey! It’s a Blog entry!!!

Sorry about the lack of actuall “Blog” udpates, but this wordpress crap is hard to figure out. Nicolette fixed it for me though, so now I can write here! So watch this space for News, Reviews and other things.

    Thanks!

   -John

Hey Everybody!

 A couple of days ago, one of those wonderful little robots that trolls the internet found my little site here and proceeded to spam be bejeesus out of it. As a result, I have activated a CAPTCHA system that I have been told, doesn’t work very well. So, if you want to comment, but can’t, then feel free to drop me a line at : johnsanford@earthlink.net.

  I love getting e-mail!  Go ahead!

   Thanks, and sorry!

     -John

Hey folks!!!

Like many people I have a Facebook page. (Waits while everyone calls him a sissy). Everyone finished? Okay.

Anyway.

About a year ago, I posted a bunch of Chippy and Loopus cartoons from the “Baby Shower” story line in a photo album entitled “My foul-mouthed comics”.  Anyway, it sat there for a year without comment..until today when I recieved this one:

“Don’t you think that the language might be a little bit to offensive?”

Believe it or not, this is the first time I have ever recieved this comment.  Well, that isn’t exactly so. A while ago, I did a version of the strip that was newspaper-safe in preparation for submission to newspaper syndicates. I posted one of the strips on “Storyboredom”, the blog I share with a bunch of my story artist pals.  One of my freinds observed that reading a sanitized version of the strip was like watching “The Sopranos” on A&E.

One of the reasons I think that no one ver complains about the language in the strip is that anyone who is offended just clicks away.

Still, I’m curious about any thoughts you all may have on this issue.

I’m all ears!

Really, I am!

-John

Photoshop Tomfoolery

I have to admit it, I have come to rely rather heavily on Photoshop. The above strip is a perfect example. I drew the original on lightweight bristol, inked it, erased all the pencils and then scanned it. I think that is where the problem begins; scanning. I have the typical scanner, it’s about 9″ x 12″, and of course my originals are larger so I scan in pieces and then “paste” them together in PS.

As I said, that is where the trouble starts.

Then, I look at the strip and invariably notice that one of the characters is too big, or maybe someone isn’t exactly where they need to be.  This happened in the strip above; Loopus was too small in panel one, the two ducks were too big, etc.  I tweaked and pushed and pulled until I had more or less what I wanted. I wound up doing so many tweaks that  the strip above bears little resemblance to the original, and this bothers me.  I’d like to have nice originals to look at, believe it or not.  The other thing that occured to me is that if I just spent a little more time trying to nail everything in the pencil stage, then I wouldn’t have to spend so much time on the back end doing PS fixes.

Well, you live you learn. I’ll be good at this stuff some day. Thanks for reading!

-John