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.

Kung Fu Rabbit Splash Page

This  (relatively new) panel will be featured as part of the Prologue story.

My Time With Tom

  This story took place sometime  towards the end of the first 'issue' of the KFR webcomic. I was kicking around the idea of attending  art school in order to improve my craft. I was very aware of my shortcomings as an artist, plus I had some GI Bill money I wanted to spend.  The Savannah College of Art and Design was having an open house for prospective students, and though  fully 10 years older than  the  average attendee,  I took the  trip.
  We wandered around the campus and I felt as old as Father Time. I had  gathered up   some of my more  promising projects, including a stack of KFR Bristol boards, and was toting the  whole mess around. Did I mention that I felt  old? I had done  6 years in the military, traveled the world, gotten married and had a couple of kids while most of  the other potential students could still remember who sat where in their  senior English Lit class.  Most of the   professors were doing, honestly, a horrible job at giving me any sort of feeling that I either could do this, or should do this. 
  One of the  professors told me that  I should really go see 'Tom' in the Sequential Art  Department.  We got directions, and by the time we found  the place,  the open house was  closing up.   We caught the very last few minutes of the very last group that Tom was speaking to.
  It turns out that 'Tom' was Tom Lyle.  Yes, that guy.  I had been looking at his art work for years and as the  room emptied out and as he started gathering up his stuff to close up shop, he looked at my folder and  asked "Can I take a look at that?"
  Keep in mind that his shift was over, and that the guy owed me nothing. He's established and accomplished, and I'm an old man with  some vaguely defined ambitions.  But Tom Lyle gave me almost an hour of his time as he went through page after page of my pathetic offerings.  He said nice things, surprisingly nice things. He said that I was light years ahead of most of his students as far as  maturity in my writing and  my apparent willingness to  finish a project.He told me that  the kids that come to him are right out of school and have a super-short attention span. He said "They claim they want a job drawing 8 or 10 hours a day, but they complain when I make them draw for the entire class period." He said that most people can either write, or draw, but the fact that I was doing both was  very rare. He said "If you come to school here, I can help you a lot.  But if you don't, I can only help you a little."
  it wasn't all pats on the back.  He asked me what sort of tools I was using, and when I told him he  chuckled and shook his head. "Ok, here's what you need..." and he gave me a list. He went frame by frame and told me how I could have   presented the ideas better.  He said "For crying out loud, Michael , go outside and  look at what a tree actually looks like before you try to draw one." He talked about  how a movie director  uses different angles to make the scene more interesting as apparently I had fallen into the habit of drawing a plain horizontal shot. In 45 minutes, he literally changed  everything about the way I looked at what I was doing.  I really wish I had taken notes.
  As we left, the last thing he said to me was "Seriously consider coming to school here.  Most of the kids here are  coming here on Daddy's money and they have no intention on doing anything with what I teach them. You've got more potential than 99% of the people I teach, but I can't do anything for you if you're not here."
  As it turned out,  I couldn't justify the time  with a houseful of kids and  one, sometimes two jobs. I would have had to  quit my job and move to Savannah. The comic immediately got better though, and looking back, it's like night and day. I still haven't gone to art school, and I never did  spend that GI money, but that one afternoon with Tom , and the kindness he showed me, saved me, I believe years of trial and error.  He's a nice guy, and if what I  eventually produce is  worth looking at, he has to get  partial credit for that.