Still Working Diligently - Freebies/Paper Doll Characters

Not only with inking in the art, I'm also trying to come up with 'freebies' for any Kickstarter project that I might get up and running for publishing the work. 

Ever since I found those brass brad fasteners with the short shanks I've been working on how to use them with small paper dolls of the characters.  Moving arms, waving toilet brushes, moving tails, I've got a dozen small sketches that can be worked out into some nice looking stand-up type of paper art.  And they'd be mailable as a flat item too.

I get monthly ad mailings from Office Depot that has coupons for 20% off any printing costs so that helps defray the $$$ for printing anything up.  They have card stock in two thicknesses too, and those feed through their machines just fine.  I can't even get the thin card stock to go through my printer here.  They can also do COLOR printing on card stock.  At $1.25 a sheet, but if I can get four paper dolls per sheet, that makes things a lot more affordable. 

The only issue becomes how to hole punch the right areas.  My hole punch can only go in so far, the layout of the characters has to be done in such a way that I can reach each hole without bending the paper.  That's why I thought organizing each paper doll into one quarter of a page would work better, I can have more side surface available that way, it'd still fit into a zip lock baggie and it'd still be able to be mailed flat.

E-publishing update

Well, no real information came back on my questions from the two cartoonist sites I'm on over with YahooGroups.  Argh!  That sure doesn't help.   I think my best bet will be to ask other cartoonists via their websites about it.  Go directly to the source. 

On another note I did find another cat cartoonist over on gocomics.com  that does a really nice job.  The strip is called SMITH, it's apparently a spinoff from an older strip that closed down a few years back and the artist continued with just the cats.  They are either long haired Siamese (Balinese) or some sort of Himalayan cats (my bet is on the Himmies).  I like it better than The Mows or any of the others I've been looking at.  The artist is Andrew Pilcher.  He does his in color, with one cat being a lighter color. I thought they were both males, but one apparently is female.   They meet up with another brother/sister pair outdoors, my fav is the tabby who keeps protecting 'his wall'.

Cats Rule.

Progression Of An Idea

I wanted to bring in a few strips with the Siamese featured again since she's been in the background for an awful long time now.  Whiffling through ideas...nothing was really getting my creative juices going till I came up with 'magic paws'.

If she has 'magic paws' would it be an idea I could work for more than one strip?  I wanted the smaller cats to get Marcus interested in checking her out in regards to her being 'magic' now, and of course that would not go well (paw of death being one way to end it).  He can't get the better of her because she's the better fighter even if she is smaller than he is.

But what would magic paws actually be?  Static electricity, yeah!  Maybe she's never experienced it before in a dry house.  A built up charge clawing the cat tree carpeting could fluff the fur out, do a bit of ZAPPING on the other cats, and culminate in her fur fluffed all out on end and an extended paw of reconciliation distracting from the sly toothy smile of anticipation.....  Hmm....... Yup.  Good way to end that one!  Ha! 

E-Book Publishing & Getting Up Online

Well, I'm just starting to look into how to publish up online with Kindle e-books, using Amazon's CreateSpace, checking the Barnes & Noble self publishing section, and such.  One thing I found out is that with CreateSpace the extra bandwidth needed for illustrations and pictures ends up costing the author money because they take an extra $$$ out of your cut for this.  That bites.  Not only does CreateSpace take their cut (plus extra for the drawings) but any advertisement mention done automatically over on Amazon ends up taking a cut too, bringing the author's portion way down.

Since this is all new to me, I posted questions asking for input and feedback from professional cartoonists (and semi-professional ones) over on the two main cartooning boards on YahooGroups. We'll see what they say about it.  I haven't found much on individual blogs with this topic. 

I'll keep you updated as to what I find out. If I do find out anything.

Ahhhh, Procrastination.....

ARGH! I'd hoped to focus exclusively on drawing the backlog of sketched out strips and still haven't got the Wacom up and running for that.  I feel so guilty going back to pen and printer paper to do it. 

Yes, I'm a dinosaur. Actually drawing on PAPER... how horrible!  But I do need to get these done and if that's the way it has to be, that's how they'll be drawn.  Pen and paper. 

The goal is to still get a majority of the strips finished so I can assemble the next few booklets.  80 strips per booklet.  15 to 20 minutes per strip.  One month of focus.  Cross your fingers....

Apparently I'm Doing It Wrong! LOL

I got the book Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden .  It's all about doing cartooning, single panel types, strips, graphic novels, etc.  They also put out a book called Mastering Comics which I'm only partway through.

But from what they said in the first book I'm making all sorts of 'beginner mistakes' with my cartooning. 

1. Limit the use of exclamation points. NEVER use more than one.
2. Word balloons sticking over the framing lines (ok, I stopped doing that)
3. Panels need to be separated with a gutter (space) between them. I don't do that, the lines are drawn and no space put between them, though I can see that the space IS good for putting your name and the publishing date in there with very very tiny font.

I also messed up on hand writing the dialog.  Yet they say it's 'not done' using a standard font style, and recommend making your own font to upload to your system..... Dude..... do you know the spacing issues with that stuff?

Well.  

OK.

I guess I did do some of it wrong, but I did a LOT of it right, so I'm not that upset.  I'm not going back to fix strips that were drawn three years ago.  And I like my exclamation marks.  They stay in.

I'll just make sure I print a little neater on the dialog.