I drew this cartoon yesterday as the hard drive of my Macintosh OS 9.2 here at the office made sickening grinding and whistling sounds throughout the day. The computer crashed 10 or so times and I probably spent an accumulated 2 hours looking at frozen blank screens while praying that things would come unfrozen. Anyway, here's my cartoon, warts and all.

If I had more time on my hands I would've remedied some of the things that will forever bug me about this cartoon. There's a few other details I wanted to put in before the final grind at 4:30 yesterday left me helpless to do anything more to the cartoon. The green toilet seat in the box, for instance, would've had its size increased to be at proper scale to characters in the cartoon. I'm not too happy with the colours and luminocity of the background. I chose yesterday to be experimental in my approach to creating my cartoon, emulating some of the techniques I learned while I was at the AAEC convention in Denver after an interesting presentation by Clay Bennett. He does his background separately from the foreground. Here's my background:

I've used this technique before, and I've found one of the big drawbacks to this method is how the foreground covers a lot of detail I put into the background. It's far more difficult to balance stuff in a cartoon using this technique than actually just drawing in the background after you've put in the foreground. I'm now finding that in using this technique backgrounds made simpler work best. Cartooning is a continuing education... as is trying to make blogs interesting.