I Like The Way I Drew The Whale, Too

Ok, news stories aside, I just want to say that I'm really happy with how this cartoon turned out. I very rarely feel that way about my cartoons. I'm usually not happy with either the joke, the composition, the colours, the placement of the word balloons, or the way some guy's nose sits on his face.

This one, however, makes me want to make more cartoons just like it. So, I figure, I must've done something right.

For the colours, I used Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa as a reference. The first thing that struck me was that Hokusai had an orange sky. One of my greatest pitfalls as an artist is that I spend all my creative effort in drawing and not enough with the colouring. Normally, I would've coloured the sky blue and therefore would've been stuck with a overly blue cartoon that I was unhappy with. Thankfully, that orange/yellow sky breaks the image up and even gives a sort of aurora australis feel to the image.

So, Christopher, whenever you start colouring things in a stock-standard kind of way, just remember ol' Harry Chapin and his other heartbreaking song.