Another redraw for your viewing pleasure! One of the neat things about revisiting the archives is looking back over which ideas worked and which ones didn’t. When you’re not a syndicated cartoonist, you don’t have editors and other such people giving you their feedback. Often you’ve just got to take the risk and “release it & see”. Inevitably you’ll turn out some duds, but you can also end up with some comic gems. Sometimes it’s hard to know until you put it out there.
I like to think that in the 14 years since this cartoon was first drawn, I’ve become more experienced in knowing what’s likely to work and what isn’t. This week’s idea was a good enough one on its own, but having the opportunity to put a 21st century spin on it has made it even better.
This year, I have been attending a college course in web design. This term, we were asked to come up with a website design for a fictitious client: A toy store named “Out Of The Garden Toys”.
In addition to the benefits of going through the process of budgeting & project management, the really fun part of this exercise has been in coming up with some kid-friendly designs and characters. So I thought I’d share some of my sketches with you, and give an idea of the thought processes behind it.
Basically, I wanted a boy character and a girl character – a fairy and a garden gnome – two magical characters traditionally found at the bottom of one’s garden. The fairy was easy enough to arrive at; Lots of little girls love fairies, plus I gave her a tiara, which makes her a fairy princess – two girly fantasies rolled into one! But the gnome was more difficult. Boys don’t identify so readily with magical creatures, plus the beard meant the character couldn’t relate to their age level. Dropping the beard made him younger, but also made him look more like an elf. I made his hat taller so it would show something of his gnomey origins, but I think, in the end, I can live with him being an elf.
These were drawn with biro on paper, because, in the classroom, it was all I had to work with at the time. But, just as with the card envelope designs, there is something to be said for sketching with biro as opposed to pencil. With pencils, I tend to play it safe, because I can rub out & correct as I go. But the biro gives no opportunity to correct mistakes, and so I find it actually encourages a kind of recklessness. To not be afraid of what comes out, and to continue forward, because you can’t go back. As a result, I tend to draw more freely and loosely.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts. I’m kinda gravitating to the designs on the right hand side.
Over the years, whenever someone in my family has had a birthday, I somehow developed a habit where I would draw something on the front of the birthday card’s envelope. Usually it would be their name in fancy lettering, with some pictures of objects or little characters thrown in to personalise it. I always do these with a biro, which ensures that whatever comes out will be unplanned and spontaneous. This is what makes them fun – I just start with whatever comes to mind, and make it up as I go. I never know how it’s going to turn out!
My family members would usually hang onto these envelopes long after all the other regular ones were thrown into recycling. Even though it wouldn’t have really bothered me if they didn’t – I could always draw another one at a moment’s notice. They’ve come to call it my “thing”. When preparing for a birthday, my wife would hand me a birthday card with an envelope and say “Here you go – do your thing”.
What I hitherto suspected but now know for sure is that they have come to expect this from me as part & parcel of how I say “Happy Birthday”; My sister-in-law had a birthday recently, and received a card from my wife & I. BUT because I never saw this card, it didn’t have my “thing” on it. She wanted to know where her “thing” was!
I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of doing these professionally. Like, take requests, prepare them in Photoshop, make them all neat & tidy, and print them directly onto envelopes. But then I think that that would take away some of the spontaneity that makes the biro creations fun. They wouldn’t have that same sense of ‘uniqueness’ that makes each one different.
I might be persuaded otherwise if the right situation presents itself, but for now that’s where I stand. What do you think?
Six long years and a couple of false starts later, Bartoon Central v1.0 is now live. Yeah!
The internet landscape has changed dramatically since Bartoon Central’s last incarnation in 2005. Over the years, new & exciting developments in Web Design have come along, such as CSS, JavaScript, PHP and SQL, which all added so much more dynamism & interactivity to the web. This was all foreign territory for me at the time; I thought HTML was tricky enough to master on its own!
With a new job just starting, and no time to learn this new emerging Web 2.0 stuff, Bartoon Central slipped further & further behind and was allowed to languish. Soon after, Bartoon Central’s original host, GeoCities, was bought by Yahoo, and then subsequently shut down.
That was six years ago.
Now, fuelled by WordPress, with all its database-driven goodness, Bartoon Central is in a much better position to face the future. The bartoons themselves will now have a proper automated archive (I used to have to do that manually – I can’t tell you how much of a boon this is). There’ll be hooks for RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and/or whatever else is going. It’s exciting stuff
BUT, just like version 1.0 of anything, Bartoon Central is brand new and therefore will have some rough edges. There’s still some virtual boxes to unpack and some general tidying up as I sort through how everything will work & where everything will go. I expect that as I come to know a little more about WordPress I will be able to expand Bartoon Central in all sorts of new directions.
I will welcome your feedback. In the meantime, I do hope you enjoy visiting this site!
