Every artist’s “Trek” ( a walk that is long and often difficult ) needs a beginning step. This is the first post in this new cartooning  journey.  After creating my webcomic, BugPudding , digitally for the past 15 plus years, I am reintroducing myself back into traditional, classical, cartooning drawing. Any skill learned but not practiced much for a long time will need considerable refreshment. I’m going to need a lot of warm up. I will be trying to draw cartoons first in rough pencils, followed with pen or brush inking and then, in some cases, colored with watercolor or markers. I’m not sure where this is going, and at the moment, I don’t really have a particular destination in mind. It’s all just for fun and enjoyment. I probably will find that all those years of digital cartooning will have an influence, but I’m not doing any of this as a comparison or competition between techniques. I learned drawing traditional cartooning as a kid in the 1960s and didn’t evolve into digital cartooning work until after 2005.

Traditional cartooning is often more time intensive than digital cartooning. The tools are different and editing ( undo and redo ) is really a whole lot easier on your physical erasers, pro-white and paper. I have been told by non-cartoonists that they assume that computers and software do all the work. That’s nonsense. Cartooning is highly creative hard work and digital tools are just that, they are tools. Traditional cartooning has different tools. But, even the twenty-first century has evolved some new tools and materials which I will be exploring.  I write mostly as my on personal journal, but readers are welcomed to pick up any thoughts or tips. So here he go…