Wow! Coloured strips take forever. At least if you’re as inexperienced as I am…

About 7 layers:

  1. background
  2. actual panels & title
  3. pencil sketch of the cartoon itself (made invisible later)
  4. base colours
  5. light and dark shades
  6. actual black inked drawing
  7. text

I’d never do one again, except I quite like the results.  Nearly enough to make me want to go back and redraw/colour some of the older cartoons. But only nearly 😉

Having said all that, I’d never have done any of this without tablets, pens and drawing programs. In this case originally a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 2014 edition, s-pen and sketchbook. (I’m now on a Samsung Galaxy S3.) The ability to copy and paste, layer and recover from disasters cannot be underestimated for just getting you going. With pure pen and paper this world never have happened! I’d have given up before I’d even started…

As for the strip itself – sometimes I think it would do the big names in agile good to spend some time in the kind of organisations that my colleagues and I find ourselves in. It’s a much harder sell than lecturing from a podium!