Artistic Development

  One of the many reasons that I decided to  redo KFR at this stage of life is that  the art has frankly, gotten better.  There are a lot  of reasons for the uptick in art quality. One of these reasons is  my short-lived  career as an editorial cartoonist.  For several  years there I  had meet a deadline, which I hated, but helped me. I also had to take  complex ideas and make them  understandable in a cartoon.  Lastly, I  had to really get better at drawing. The  newspaper gave me a platform to  try different techniques  and see the results in print every week as well as people's reactions.  That was invaluable, as it turned out.  Here, I'll show you exactly what I mean.
  Here is a panel from the original webcomic. It was drawn on  Bristol board, inked, scanned, tweaked, and colored on my computer using  Photoshop somewhere around 2007.  The context of the scene ( which probably won't  make it into the Prologue) is that the Easter Bunny is being pursued through the nighttime  forest  by our protagonist.

  I'm pretty sure this is the panel that  caused Tom Lyle to recommend I go outside once in a while and actually look at a tree. I  realized that I  didn't' have the understanding of shading and inking that I needed to have. I went back to the masters, like Jeff Smith and Walt Kelley (whose styles are very similar).  I went outside and looked at trees. I looked at trees at night , which is slightly more difficult since, well, it's dark. A few years later, here is the  'redo' of that same panel in line art.

 

  But wait, there's more. I had also dedicated myself to becoming at least a functional colorist.  Voila!!

  The point of all this isn't any sort of back-patting or compliment-fishing.  I merely want to emphasis that any artist is in a condition of continual growth and development as a practitioner of their art.  Something that was  a clumsy attempt  a few years ago  might be  not quite so clumsy now.  By taking things back to  square one and focusing on the basic of  drawing, and  being in a position where I had to produce caused  the differences you see  here.
  Never stop practicing, never stop drawing.