Stop Stalking Me

Another week, another cartoon! This week is pretty much a clean, family friendly cartoon for once!

Seriously though, why is there so many cat videos on YouTube? So the idea for this one originated from that thought, that and I wondered how did cat owners get so much footage? Do they just stalk their cats with a camera all day? Don't get me wrong here, I love a good funny cat video/picture as much as the next guy, but seriously there's so much! At one point I was going to draw the cat exactly like Garfield as an ode to him because you see, Garfield was what got me into cartooning in the first place. I spent a lot of my childhood reading and copying Garfield comics, which is how I learnt how to draw in fact and you can see some of that influence in my style even now. But I thought that putting Garfield in there would confuse the joke and make him the focal point and that would ruin it. So I ended up making him orange at least and did steal Garfield's tail, but that's it (I had to have something there at least). I am seriously out of practice though as the original rough sketch for this 'toon it looks like a dog! I need to practice my animals. 

So last week I finally got around to formatting my PC and installing Windows 7, man it's really sweet. My PC is running better than ever, working on this 'toon ran so smooth compared to what it was like before. Which I have to admit I haven't formatting in years so it was pretty bogged down with shit. So once again I'm doing some very subtle experimentation with how I do my cartoons, today I inked by hand and kept all the lines simple and at a similar width and did all the fine detail, like hatching, on the PC in Photoshop when I coloured it. I also drew the very simple background in Photoshop as well and didn't use any black outlines, just a darker colour of what it was outlining. What do you think? I like experimenting, it's a good way to improve your style and to evolve. Oh and you can tell I've been watching way too much Shaun the Sheep with my son of late (he's seriously obsessed with that show at the moment, I've watched it so many times) as the lawyer guy looks like the farmer from Shaun! Just wait, I'll probably do a sheep joke soon.....don't worry my Kiwi friends I know what you're thinking and no, that's way too easy, it'll be something else. ;-)

Once again thanks for the feedback on last weeks cartoon, I'm really proud of last weeks and I'm really glad you guys liked it as much as I did. Hey, look at that I did the whole blog without a pussy joke of some sort!

Until next time my friends!

Mike