Did you notice anything different about today’s comic? Besides the fact that this is the most we’ve seen of Chain-Link Jefferson in like, a year? This marks the first time since September 2007 that I didn’t do any shading. I’ve been spending a lot of extra time shading the comic over the past year or so, so it pretty much became a force of habit. I draw the art, I color it, then I take it all into Photoshop and start shading. Well, a little while back, I brought the art into Photoshop, put a bold black line around it, and said…now wait a minute. I’ve been spending probably an extra hour per strip adding shadows n’ such, and I actually think it looks better and cleaner without them. To my eye, it looks more “cartoony.” Looking back at the strips with shadows in them, I now think they’re really a little distracting! Of course, your opinion may vary! If you don’t like the new sans-shadow style, I urge you to sit down and write a long, well thought-out e-mail, tell me exactly what you don’t like about it, and then send it to trash@george-comics.com.
Zing!!
Hey, I must agree, my friend. The strip does look much cleaner without the shading on the characters! Great job!
Thanks, Mac. I’d guesstimate that I wasted about 5 solid days of my life doing nothing but shading. Ha!
John,
Great strip as always. I actually give the edge to the shading– I think it brings things to life a little more, but your work looks great even without shading, so I trust whatever you go with. Time is an important element of life. Just don’t stop doing the comic!
Thanks for the input, Mark. I agree that time is important–if shading really made a stunning difference in how the comic looked, I would probably not toss it to the wayside; in this case, however, it’s at least arguable whether or not it is an improvement over NOT shading, so I’ll take the time I save shading and apply it to other things in life. Like cake. I like cake!
Cake IS good. I just bought Twinkies the other day for the first time in like… I don’t know, 20 years (in fact, I think that box of Twinkies was right next to the one I bought 20 years ago…).