Finished a comic today - Melon and Jelly

I have some plots ready to apply to some cartoony cat characters that I recently developed on paper, after their living in my mind for sooo long.

One image is finished, entirely created in ink. I'm waiting for some camera equipment to charge up so I can photograph it in my highest quality for archiving, in case I'm famous some day. Meanwhile, I have cell phone photos to share.

In the beginning

The idea was an intro to the characters: one cat stuck in a tree, doing what kitties do, and the other patiently trying to get his or her attention. I wanted to try a perspective drawing, so the tree cat would be close up and in your face, to emphasize how animal instincts take over. First I collected photos of plants. I sketched plants. I wandered suspiciously in the garden outside my apartment building, with a clipboard and sketchpaper in hand. My drawings turned out pretty well, but there wasn't really an ideal specimen to practice on. It needed to be a houseplant, like a potted tree or something sturdy enough to (sorta) support the weight of a cat climbing it.

Then I needed images of how a cat looks when clinging to a tree. That was easier, thanks to a Google image search. After that, I had enough technical info to begin drawing on illustration paper. I also knew that I wanted to use ink, because I received so many interesting and supportive comments for my only ink painting so far which hung in a gallery a few months ago. This image will be ink success #2!

Plant shaping up with perspective

Cat body in progress

Background colours starting to appear

Inking gone wild

When working with ink, I have difficulty deciding where to start. So, I usually start filling in some colour, similar to adding mass or tones in an underpainting. With ink, I'm not sure how one does an underpainting, so since I'm using acrylic ink, I treat it a bit like an acrylic painting, where subsequent colouring covers over even the most bold initial marks.

The 'cat up tree' image is only my second ink drawing that is fully painted with ink. I'm not sure ink is meant to be used this way, but I like how it looks, so I'll keep doing some pieces this way.

Unfortunately I constantly forget that some inks are opaque, and many of mine are transparent. It's challenging to lay down colour such as white, to hide a mistake or change some shapes. For example, my little cat standing on the floor was intended to be a beige colour, but once the brown dried, white glazes looked strange, and I found that pinks subdued my harsh brown much better than white did. Between the start and finish of this image, I added white and cool grey to my collection of colours, so that I can make beige, and subtle shadows for occasions like this, where the whole page is going to be filled with colour.

It would also be ideal to take the time to add tones before diving greatly into colouring for these situations. For some reason, I feel compelled when using ink, to just dive right in and colour the items. Maybe it's the nature of acrylic. It dries quickly and you can address one piece of an image at a time, quite differently than working with watercolours.

Subsequent comic panels will probably be made digitally with Painter or iPad apps like ArtRage or ProCreate, or minimally-inked, to save time and get my ideas out quickly.

Green ground balances green leaves perhaps

Still learning colour mixing

Close to finishing

Background became golden to help plant stand out

I decided on blue, no surprise...I like bright colours

Don't drink the water! The coffee is okay, though

Cats are starting to have faces and details

Still not quite finished...and it's been a long process

Finally success!

The finished piece by Heidi Bada

I like how the flying bug turned out; he seems to be glowing and appealing to the blue cat Melon. The little guy on the floor kinda stuck in my mind to be a slower-moving character, so I'm glad he or she (I still haven't decided) looks cute and cuddly in pink, since my attempted beige didn't work. I was surprised how painstaking it was to create highlight and shadow sides to the tree and cat. The shadow portions involved grey sometimes, and other times just more brown, and yellow and white helped produce highlights. With practice, I'm sure this task will become easier. As I said before, acrylic ink dries quickly, including the stock on my palette where I was trying to mix lighter and darker shades for the tree and Melon (the blue cat). Now that I think of it, the pink cat should probably be female. Seems obvious now. But we'll have to wait and see! I guess that's my comic strip cliffhanger for you today.

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FYI- all images everywhere on my blog are All Rights Reserved. Do not copy or use the images in any commercial manner, such as printing to post on your wall or pasting into your website. I will consider requests to use images for academic and personal purposes, and I'm available for hire for commercial image creation and am willing to discuss rights management arrangements for digital, merchandise, and other rights to commercial and personal usage of my images.