I’ve edited the comic from the original post, changing the sign on the booth and, curiously, the amount the kids have earned. The original was riffing more off the original, but was creepy enough that even I couldn’t abide it.
This one is just dark.
As an aside, we had a challenge years ago to “Make Marmad*ke funny” and my entries were invariably creepy or dark. The creepy ones tended to be very creepy. I think I’m good with dark now. And yes, I am deliberately not spelling out the giant dog’s name. You can probably figure it out, though!
HORSE is not one of the prompts, but for the sake of my headline, pretend it is.
As I pondered whether to take part in Inktober 2024, I looked over the list of prompts (they reveal them all in advance now) and whoever came up with the list really likes exploring/camping and the like, because almost the entire list fits these themes. It’s actually easier to list the prompts that don’t fit:
Grungy (though an argument could be made for it)
Scarecrow
Jumbo
Violin
Here’s the full list:
Looking over the official blog, the list was unveiled on August 26 with no additional description or anything, but ain’t no way words like expedition, hike, roam, trek, uncharted and backpack are a coincidence. A lot of these words would even inspire the same sketches, which is kind of weird. Maybe the idea is to inspire some “outside the box” thinking by including so many similarly themed words.
In any case, the first prompt, BACKPACK, is not inspiring me, so I probably won’t bother this year. But that’s OK–I’m still drawing! In fact, I’ll post something later today.
During Inktober 2019 I did a sketch of a frog wearing a crown for the prompt ENCHANTED:
It’s perfectly cromulent for a quick sketch, but it exhibits one of the issues I had when I started drawing again after many years: uneven, wobbly lines.
There are two things I did to change this:
In the primary drawing program I use, Procreate (iPad-only), I have turned on smoothing, which automatically smooths out lines as you draw them. The smoothing effect is kept low, because it gets weird and laggy as you crank it up, and I only need a little smoothing to balance out my hand’s natural wobble.
The other thing was just draw better. I used to draw lines in segments, then fix each segment if I erred, resulting in ugly, blobby lines. You might generously call it a style if it was intentional. Over time, I learned to just draw longer, more balanced lines. If I messed up, I’d redraw the entire line, not just a section of it.
I recently did a simple coloured version of the same sketch and ended up redoing all the line work, so it’s effectively ENCHANTED 2.0. Because I was rushing, there are a few little bits that should probably be cleaned up, and I may do that at some point. Mainly, this is just another chance for me to take an older piece, and show how just a few minutes with a more practised hand can make a noticeable difference. To my eye, anyway1Yes, in a way, this post is the world’s longest way of humble bragging about how much better I think I can draw now than in 2019..
Colour frog (I lost the original reference, so the colours are just my best guess for something frog-like):
Eventually, I’m going to try more experiments in line thickness, so I can get a result somewhere between the wonky lines of the first sketch and the rigid uniformity of the colour update. Still, progress!
Based on a photo I took at Burnaby Lake this summer.
This is the first time the background1I’m still not sure I’m entirely happy with it, either, but it’s pretty close. I may tweak it, I may not. took longer to do than the actual bird. Much longer!
I started about three different drawings, and they were getting too complex, so I started again with the idea of keeping it super simple. I drew a swoopy line and it turned into a purple onion thing. It took less than five minutes Ta-da!
I am one of those who believes we are in a big ol’ AI bubble and that bubble is going to burst and leave a big mess that will probably leave tech CEOs unscathed, but result in more mass layoffs of workers. Such is our society as of now.
I understand and agree with those who object to AI companies hoovering up data without permission, then repackaging it in dubious and energy-sucking ways. Generally, AI is bad, and its positives are small. For me, it has been a silly diversion when I indulge in it, which is not often. For example, I have a NightCafe account (an AI image generation site) with over 3,000 unsued credits. You get 5 free credits per day. So yeah.
But I occasionally indulge and one of my interweb friends shared some silly songs he’d made using Suno. It was mildly amusing, but then he mentioned you can write your own lyrics, so I had to try it.
I brainstormed for several minutes (quite literally) and wrote a song called “Pickles and Cat.” I told Suno to make the song country and upbeat. It generated two versions. This is the first and “best” (IMO) and is likely the closest I’ll ever come to writing and performing music. I’m good with that. Garage Band is hard.
(I made the artwork in Canva, it was a labour of love.)
Pickles and Cat
I like my pickles and I like my cat My cat likes pickles, well, how about that?
I put my pickles in jars And I send 'em to Mars
Now the Martians have my pickles Nothing else rhymes with pickles
And the Martians they ate them all up I sent my cat but they wanted a pup I told them no sir, I can't do that Then they said OK, send the cat
Pickles and cat, my two favorite things Green and orange, they make my bells ring
Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some But not mine, I'm not sharing none
When my cat got to Mars he scratched a couch It was a Martian, and the Martian yelled ouch
My cat ran away to a big rocket ship Pressed all the buttons and went on a trip
Landed on a big space rock and scratched up the place Now no one goes there, it's his own private space
Pickles and cat, my two favorite things Green and orange, they make my bells ring
Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some But not mine, I'm not sharing none
This is me promising on the internet to do something. Maybe not today, but soon, as defined as “in the next couple of days.” In the meantime, to help inspire me, my bird art of a Sandhill crane:
With the site redesign mostly complete, I think I need a new logo, something that isn’t just literally the name of the site. Yes, I know it’s clean and efficient, but it’s also sterile and blah.
I still want something sleek and uncluttered. I will ponder.
When I tinkered around in Canva, I ended up with this:
It both does and doesn’t speak to me. It’s also full of hidden meaning that no one else would ever figure out.
But the actual logo will probably not feature a jar of pickles.
I finally finished going through Episode 1 of Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards, reworking the comic to make it more palatable in the age of high-resolution monitors. I tried not to George Lucas it up by drastically changing the artwork and making this a Special Edition™, focusing more on preserving the original art, just making it smoother and more refined.
You can view the updated episode in the gallery below or on the AC vs. QB page linked above.
Issues with the HD version of Episode 1:
Continuity: The QBs are Blood Eagle (red), but in several panels the tower is shown as also being red, meaning under QB control, despite it being claimed by Angry Carrot. Whoops!
The line thickness on AC and minions varies a bit from panel to panel. I went back and redid a few, but the rest I declare just part of the charm.
The word balloons and text are sometimes a bit too big/spacious. This was a result of changing the font from Verdana to Back Issue BB, which have very different properties. In a few cases, I manually chopped down the size of the balloon and had to paint over the old balloon underneath to keep it from rudely poking through.
I dropped the outline on the balloons as it was too much work to easily replicate.
I adjusted the brightness of the shots to try to make them as even as possible, but a few are still too dark or too bright. Again, part of the charm!
On the plus side, the improvements:
Panels are now 1920×1440 instead of a tiny 640×480.
Redrawn Angry Carrot and minions have much more refined line work than the originals, with far fewer jaggies.
I forgot to give Angry Carrot arms in a few panels where he clearly should have had arms. This has been corrected.
The Back Issue BB font gives the episode more of a comic book look (this is a matter of taste, but I’m including it here).
I redid the first panel to make it match all other episodes, tweaking the fonts where necessary.
How I redid the episode:
I started by using Pixelmator Pro’s Super Resolution feature to preserve detail while increasing the images from 640×480 to 1920×1440.
Every panel featuring Angry Carrot and/or minions was brought into Procreate, where I retraced and recoloured over the original art. These were then exported as Photoshop (PSD) files to preserve layers.
I loaded all the upscaled art into Affinity Photo, then redid the text and word balloons, and made other minor tweaks to colours and other bits.
I saved these as Affinity Photo files to preserve the layers.
All panels were then batch exported as PNG, WEBP and JPG files. Although the WEBP files were smallest, they subtly toned down the colours of Angry Carrot in a way I didn’t like, so I went with the JPG versions.
Yes, this is a weird choice for updating the comic, a brief “Where are they now?” update I slapped together while I pondered where to take the comic (nowhere, ultimately!)
I got the idea to redo the strip because the original panels (as mentioned previously) are absurdly tiny on a typical widescreen monitor, at a mere 375 x 281 pixels.
It was a fun little experiment to modernize the comic, as I had to redo some of it from scratch and probably redid some of the panels significantly faster than originally when I handcrafted them from the chunky pixels and stone tools of 2002.
- All panels increased to 1920x1440 resolution - Main font changed from Verdana to Back Issues BB for a more comic book look - Revised characters were drawn in Procreate on an iPad Pro - Revised artwork, text and dialog balloons were added in Affinity Photo
Individually:
1. Completely redone. 2. Used screenshot taken from Diablo II: Resurrected. 3. Resized the dialog balloon to make it smaller. Painted over the old balloon, then copied and pasted parts of the background to better blend everything in. I was helped here by how crude and low resolution a blown-up image from Jedi Knight (1997) looks in 2024. 4. Found new still life for background, made the pepper look less still, more peppery, since that seemed a likely reason for him being fired. A “still” version of the pepper also exists in a hidden layer in the original Procreate sketch. 5. New background, new lighting effect added in Affinity Photo. Celery characters were traced over from the originals. Evil version has a tweaked goatee. 6. Changed GIANT Chinese Egg Attack!! to the less culturally insensitive GIANT Evil Egg Attack!! Redid the eggs to look angry/evil. Open mouths reveal yolk-filled innards. 7. Completely redone with new colour image of Freud (same pose) and new background. 8. Completely redone. 9. Completely redone. 10. Completely redone. Figures were traced from originals and refined a bit. 11. Completely redone.
I am planing to at least take another look at the high-resolution version of Episode 1 I also did recently, to see if I want to tweak that one (and maybe others) as well.
In another case of nostalgia gone horribly weird, I’ve started perusing the old Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comics I did a quarter of a century ago and realized that the images are super tiny because back in 2000 everyone still had 15-inch monitors. Observe a random panel from Episode 6.5:
Squint to see the filly.
This shot is shown at its full resolution–a whopping 375×281 pixels. It’s like a Diablo II postage stamp.
I decided to super-size all the images to 1920×1440 using the Super Resolution™ feature in Pixelmator Pro for the main comic panels (which are 640×480, so large postage stamps) and it worked surprisingly well, even preserving the text balloons decently. But some have required more fiddling and none of these panels were made with fancy layer technology, so it’s a bit like fixing up an old painting–you need to be careful to not muck it up.
This is mucking it up.
What I have found is in some cases I need to actually redo pretty much the entire panel. For example, here’s the Diablo II panel above in its shiny new 2024 version:
Even shrunken down for the post, it’s still four times bigger than the original.
Upscaling the original panel looked grossbuckets. The shot above is from Diablo II Resurrected, which offers much better graphics than the original, though I could have toggled on the original 2000 era graphics for maximum fidelity, but that many giant pixels would look very chunky at 1920×1440. I also changed the font to one more befitting a comic. This means I have to change the font in every panel now. Whoops.
And while it’s a bit silly to go back and do all this work for something very few people will see, I’m enjoying it, and it’s fun to revisit the old comics and make them a little more presentable for our shiny modern age.
