I recently watched a concert of Ed Sheeran singing “Thinking Out Loud” when the camera panned to the person playing the piano and it turned out to be Chris Martin from Coldplay and the song finished with a duet. I sat there thinking, “Wow, that really worked.” Collaborating with another ...

CHARACTER SHAPES
I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated something-or-other.
Characters derived from basic shapes can give a very strong impression of their basic personality type. This can help the ...

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For Quackcast 237 we asked people about the songs that inspire them when they do their comics, which songs go with which parts of their comics, what would be the ideal comic movie theme, what songs or music get you in the MOOD to do your comic, and finally ...

Usually I try to keep my newsposts geared towards art/writing/comics, but this week I have politics on the brain!

Here in Canada our election is only a month away (October 19, 2015 – get out and vote, Canadians!). I just spent my evening at a packed little cafe where ...

A friend of mine, many years ago, showed me a cartoon that was fascinating, funny, and horrifying. In my memory, it was the first anime I'd ever seen. I'd forgotten most of it over the years, and would try to find it once every so often, without knowing ...

You know that idea about a frog in a pot of water getting cooked before realising that the water had been gradually increasing in temperature until it was rapidly boiling? Well last week, I was the frog and my room was that pot of water.

September has been the hottest ...

Like I've mentioned before, I was…and am…a big Archie fan. As a youngster, I would pick up a digest from the grocery store checkout line whenever I had the money.
I would usually flip through the digest before buying, to see if there were any stories drawn ...

“Save ALL your work. Never throw your old art in the trash!” was a repeated mantra from all my art teachers over the years. The reasoning behind this idea makes sense: Old art is like a time capsule for fresh ideas and it can be a great addition in a ...

After a long comic-making hiatus, I’ve had several ideas for comics in the last little while. Working on the first one, though, I’ve realized that unless I get a heck of a lot faster at drawing it's unlikely that all of my ideas will ever come to ...

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What's best? One big climax, multiple small ones, early, or delayed? How much should you work UP to a climax? What about anticlmactic events, how important are they?
Climaxes are really important in stories. Often you work up to them over the course of a whole series, but ...