Inking in Flash

Since I got my Cintiq, I've been trying to take a little time to dabble in digital inking. I figured I'd start by working in Flash, because I think that's what a lot of other cartoonists do. By watching a few online tutorials and practicing the craft, I think I've managed to achieve a non-horrible level of ability. Check these out:


The challenge is figuring out how to avoid getting those ugly, Flashy-looking lines, that do all kinds of things a computer would do, but real ink would never do. If you click on these and look closely, you can definitely find the tell-tale signs. I think if I tried hard enough, I could get rid of most of those, but the process would take ten times as long. So no wonder so many people allow a certain amount of Flashy-ness in their inking.


After I spend some more time with Flash, I plan to move on and try my hand at inking in Illustrator, and maybe a few other programs.

Recent Sketches

Old Sketches - 1988

Here's another batch of old sketchbook drawings, this time going way back to the fall of 1988!


If you want to see more old sketches, check out these posts you might have missed:

May, 1992
July, 1996
December, 1999
September, 2006
June, 2007
June, 2008

November, 2009

Comic Jams

I'm in a club, you know, of middle-Alabama cartoonists, called the Salty 'Ham Cartooneestas. We've recently added some galleries to our web site, and you can see some comic jams here that I've worked on along with the other members:

Comic Jam '08 - The Secret Sorcerer

Comic Jams '09

Turtle Clock

I was asked to create a face for a child's clock, and here it is. Whaddya think?

Student Art

I recently found a whole bunch of slides of my student artwork. These are from high school (ASFA) and college (SVA), so that encompasses the late 80's and early 90's. I decided to scan them, so I could save them on my hard drive for posterity. They're pretty darn student-level, so I'll just put up the twelve least-bad ones here.

Mommy of All Hiccups - Scrolly Comic

For a little while now, John Kricfalusi (creator of Ren & Stimpy) has been posting rough cartoon storyboards on his blog. These, along with a few similarly formatted web comics I've seen, got me thinking: We ought to coin a term for web comics where you have to keep scrolling down and down and down. I'm suggesting "scrolly comics."

Scrolly comics have their advantages and disadvantages. You lose the beauty of artful panel arrangements. But there's something fun about just continuing to scroll down and down, as you reveal more and more of the story. They're also handy for posting on blogs, which are already set up for continually scrolling down.

As an experiment, I decided to take a 4-page, traditionally-formatted comic I drew recently and turn it into a scrolly comic. (You may have already read it HERE, in its original version, a few months ago.) Here it is in scrolly form:


Do you prefer the traditional version, or the scrolly version? It was easy to transform it, so it occurs to me that any old comic could be quickly turned into a scrolly comic, if anybody wanted to.