Pages 1 and 2

When I was a kid my biggest problem with drawing was clogged Rapidographs. I dreamed of the day when I'd master those exquisite but leaky pens. Alas, I never dreamed someday I'd be drawing on a tablet and painting digitally. My quandary these days is finding a tool that'll let me insert gradient fills for backgrounds. Add to this the learning curve of file management, .jpg vs. .xcf files, scanning dpis, canvas sizes, and color management. For reasons unknown the scanned word balloons in these drawings came out extremely fuzzy. Oh to be 20 again and have the time to leisurely explore and experiment. I'm still hoping to one day become proficient enough with these new techy tools that I can whip out several pages per day. For now, I'm slow, slow, slow. 

2 pages down, 448 to go. (Notice: I redid the bottom half of page one....).

Page 1

As elderly readers will notice, the last panel is a riff on Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. This will certainly alienate me from my target audience--modern university students. Since finding popular culture references that relate to today's 18 year olds requires more research than I'm willing to do, I resign myself to obscurity to all but those in their 60s.

However, as young readers of the first panel will realize, I give a nod to Ultimate Frisbee, a wildly popular game among university students (as far as I know). How well I connect to readers in both age groups remains to be seen.

As far as artistic proficiency, I'm choosing to publish ASAP despite the fact I'm not satisfied with my technique. My biological clock is ticking and want to get this thing done before I'm too infirm to create.

Once I've completed the first ten pages or so I'll publish them all on my other blog for popular consumption. One page down, 449 to go.