Dog the Spot: Bye!

horque on June 30, 2013

Okay, so Dog the Spot started decades ago (in 1988) as a very limited concept for a comic strip for an arts magazine. I felt that the four strips I did then sort of hit the limit of the concept.
Some years back, I had eye operations which left me with different fixed focal lengths in each eye (about 10cm in one and 20cm in the other). I felt unable to draw comics any more. Then one day, I hit on the notion of resurrecting Dog the Spot, as it required very little drawing skills. I found, to my surprise, that I had quite a few ideas that I thought could work for Dog. So, I started doing a weekly Dog the Spot strip on-line.
He's changed a lot visually over the last 7 years (he's much less splatty than he was in 1988), and I've managed to get a strip out every Sunday without fail.
One month (Movember 2007, I think), I had a daily Fa-Mous Faces spot, which was fun.
After a bit less than 2 years, I started to do another strip, Just a Stage, on Wednesdays. Once again, I've not missed one. I intended to draw Just a Stage by hand, but I was still not comfortable with my eyesight, so I soon moved to drawing them with the same vector-based drawing software that I used for Dog.
It took a bit over 2 years for me to add a third strip into the weekly mix, withProfessor Vessant appearing on Fridays. I've met the schedule for it each week as well. It is drawn by hand these days (at times in the past, it has been drawn with raster-based paiting software. After some time, I began colouring it in software too.
However, the experiment is over, for now. I have enough Dog the Spot strips for a daily calendar (on a leap year!), and am going to try to spend my time elsewhere for the next year at least.
Thanks to everyone who supported the strips. Feel free to email me about them at dts@horque.com
Please check out my family card game at glimerick.com and enter the monthly competition there. I am currently producing a copy of Glimerick every 2 days (or so) and hope to soon have enough copies to try to do something with them.
I also hope to bring an animated Professor Vessant to YouTube at some stage. Watch for a children's book I plan to illustrate for my partner, Lauren (Loz), in the future too.
Maybe someday down the track,I'll get back onto my pet comic strip project Back Woods, featuring Dudley the Echidna, Arthur the Platypus, and all.