People do ask me what materials I use to draw and color the cartoons, and I'm happy to tell them. Many people can tell that I use colored pencils, because it does give a particular look. When I started Rock Garden Comics in 1994, I drew in black and white but did not color them. I got this idea in my head that cartoons are the People's Art. As such, they should be accessible to everyone, and that includes anyone who wants to draw them, too. Even at the beginning, I knew that I would share anything that I learned along the way. I'm just like that.
To fit into my vision of The People's Art, I decided that whatever materials I use should be inexpensive and available everywhere. I had a bug up my behind about it, and nothing else would do, so I bought everything I used at Walmart, including the drafting table that I still use today. It's a little the worse for wear, but I'm sentimental about it. As long as it will stand there for me, that's the one I'll use. To start, I bought a few styles of roller ball pens, a tablet of so-called artist's paper, and a ream of copy paper. While I intended to use the copy paper for practice, I ended up loving it for drawing cartoons.
The slick surface of copy paper makes it ideal for use with roller ball pens. It's strong and can take quite a bit of erasing. Speaking of that, I bought several erasers to try, too. The kind I liked best were art gum erasers. They look rubbery and cause the least damage to the copy paper. I always sketch with good old #2 pencils. As long as the pencil marks are light, they erase easily.
For a long time I preferred extra fine roller ball pens. There's something magical about roller ball pens to me. They glide effortlessly over the copy paper. It almost feels like I'm skating when I draw, and I never get tired of that wonderful sensation. Over the last couple of years, I've switched to Fine pens. I like the stronger line, and I have the confidence to make a thicker line, now. I never even considered using pen and ink. Even though they're not expensive, really, you can't get them at Walmart, so they don't fit in with my People's Art vision. Yes, I know; I'm quirky.
I drew like a fiend in black and white only for the first ten years. This was mainly because I got lucky at the very beginning. The editor of my local paper liked the cartoons (well, some of them, at least) and printed them in the local newspaper. I'll talk about that later, too. I had showed her both single panel and three panel cartoons, but she refused to print the three panel ones at all. She flat out told me that she liked to use my cartoons for filler, in case they had extra space.
The lure of publication hooked me on single panel cartoons, but there's a lot to recommend them otherwise. Hardly any of the other artists I know use single panel. They say it's just too hard to concentrate a good idea into one panel. I agree that it's hard, sometimes very hard, indeed, but I got used to it right up front, and now I like using that format just fine. One feature of my personality, and I'll leave it to others whether it's a virtue or a flaw, is that I tend to stay with things to the end, unless I have a good reason to change. When it comes to cartoon output, it's definitely a virtue. I can crank out cartoons forever, or at least as long as Mother Nature will cooperate! You could call it a liability, concerning experimenting with different techniques and mediums. But I'm really too busy for that, anyway.
After I'd been on the web for a few months, I started getting the itch to color the cartoons. The main reason for this was looking at other people's webcomics. You know; the grass is always greener, and all that. Coloring the cartoons turned out to be a much more major undertaking than I would ever have imagined. In fact, if I'd known how steep the learning curve would be with coloring, I truly think that I would have stayed with black and white. There are other important considerations involving the choice of black and white versus color, too. And that will probably take up the next post, at least.
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