Stuffed

After weeks of comic strips and birthday cards I'm finally back to my roots with a single panel gag this week, especially as it's also a remake of a really old cartoon. I mentioned a few months back that I have a stack of old cartoons that I like the joke for but hate the art now, so I want to redo them and this is one such cartoon. Here's the original cartoon from over 10 years ago:

So you can see that the joke is exactly the same, but wow so much has changed in the last 10 years! God I hated how I did my signature back then....So instead of a generic hand puppet I replaced her with Miss Piggy and I made the finger puppets look more like basic finger puppets and not women shoved on a hand. I didn't feel the need for a bartender any more, I think about the only thing I liked in this old one was Sweep (from Sooty and Sweep a kids show I used to watch when I was a kid) downing a beer in the background, but in the new version it's Sooty this time downing a beer. I liked that idea so much I threw in 3 more famous puppets in the background with him, do you know who they all are? You know what's weird? The fact that some of the colours kind of stayed the same without meaning too! Like the finger puppets the one with her arms crossed is in green and they both have black and red hair, just swapped now. And the prominence of purple, but that's just me anyway..it's interesting as I didn't reference the old cartoon at all when I did the new one, I started from scratch and it's amazing the similarities they both have. I think it's a really good indication on how my art has progressed, involved and improved over all these years, it's cool.

I also was trying something new with this one, I've been toying around with the idea of doing monochromatically coloured backgrounds, just to make this more be more in the background and to help get more focus of the foreground. I also want to start experimenting with coloured linework on the background as well, like I used to back when I started this blog. What do you think?

Hope you like it, until next time!

Mike