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June 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:05
Episode 551 Scott Adams: Creating a Dilbert Comic While You Watch
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And I'm going to teach you the technique.
I don't know if I'll get all the way to the end.
I'm just going to do the fun parts, the stuff that you might wonder about.
I always get questions about this sort of stuff.
How do you do it? What's the process?
So I thought I would show it to you, live.
Now there's one part of the process I can't show you live because it's the only thing you have to do privately, which is think of the idea and write it.
So what I've started with, and by the way, let me tell you what my equipment is and then I'll tell you the process.
So this is a Wacom.
W-A-C-O-M, wait, is it O-M? Yeah, W-A-C-O-M, Cintiq, C-I-N-T-I-Q. You can Google those and find the latest models.
There are newer models in this.
There's one that's a little bit bigger that I'll be getting pretty soon.
Now, it comes with some controls, which you can see over here.
Some controls.
And you can set those up to be whatever key commands you want.
So if there are a certain set of repetitive keystrokes, you can program them here.
So I've got my copy and my paste and my save and everything programmed in.
So you learn essentially another skill on top of drawing.
To use this equipment, you also learn almost like keyboarding over again.
Because with my left hand, I'm using the controls.
I'm hitting the control button, the shift button, etc.
My cat is going to do a walkthrough here.
So, hold on.
Cat in the picture. We're having a cat problem.
Cat tail. Live stream.
Alright. So, that's the equipment.
I'm using a stylus in which I will draw on the screen.
If you're wondering what this is on my hand, it's a photographer's glove that normally would have fingers.
I cut the fingers off And I created a little glove that I used just for drawing because when my hand is on the screen, I don't want the oil of my hand to be on the screen.
So this is just a little hack that somebody taught me who was using the same equipment.
All right. Now, I've created a font in my own handwriting, specifically my cartoon lettering handwriting.
So I've got all of the sentences in the list over here where they appear in their own layer, meaning you can treat them differently and delete them in their own layer without affecting the rest of the composition.
So I start with a file that's got the boxes already drawn, and the next thing I do is I write the joke.
This was a joke that was suggested somehow.
I forget how I got the idea.
But it's about the character Alice who's going to have a bad hair day.
But because it's the comic strip world, the bad hair day is going to be really, really bad.
I've got the lettering in here, and by the way, this is creating another text box.
If you hear that noise in the background, it's my cat going nuts on her scratching post.
All right, so below the equipment I've got my keyboard, which you can sort of barely see here.
And I tuck it underneath the Wacom.
And by the way, the Wacom can go up like this to become a standing desk.
So you can stand up and write down on it.
Or it can be like this in more of an easel situation.
Or straight up to be just a computer monitor.
So this is also my general purpose computer.
It's just a regular Mac.
You can use a Windows machine as well.
Alright, so if I wanted to add text, I would just select the text tool from the toolbox.
It doesn't matter that you can't see this clearly, because I'm explaining it as I go.
And I just select an area, and then I would just say, this is a test of the text tool.
And that quickly, I can create another box of text, which I can move around.
Once I've turned on my little keyboard thing, I can move it around, I can put it wherever I want.
I can also change its size.
So I can make it gigantic letters, and then I can make it go away, because that was just a test.
So the next thing I do, once I have it written, is I start boxing in sort of as a first draft, who are the characters and what positions are they in.
So this first box is going to be the boss character, and he's going to be on his phone at a meeting.
Where others are at the meeting and they're waiting for Alice and they're wondering why she's late.
The answer is going to be she's having a bad hair day, but I can zoom in to the box and it'll be a little difficult to look at you and draw at the same time, so talk among yourselves.
So this box I've got here is a navigation box.
So wherever I move things in the little box, the big box moves as well.
So that's just a navigation thing.
Over here we've got the brush sizes, so I can change my brush sizes there.
Over here are all the tools that I'm going to use, the drawing tools and the lines and the eraser.
And then over here are what in Photoshop are called the layers.
So every time I add a new layer to it, it's treated separately so that later I can combine layers or get rid of layers and it's just a convenience for drawing.
Alright, so in this first box, the boss is going to be on his phone and he's going to be asking something.
So I want to go to the layer that I call the rough.
So everything I draw now will be a layer that will go away.
It's the first draft layer.
Later, I'll be able to see that layer from a higher layer.
In other words, I'll be able to see it as if I'm looking through tracing paper, to use an old analogy.
And then I'll do the final drawing on the upper layer, and when I'm done, I'll delete the bottom layer and just have the clean final drawing.
So what I'm doing now is the rough layer, and I'm thinking, okay, it's the boss, he's on the phone, he's at a meeting, so there's going to be some kind of a table.
The Dilber universe is intentionally very simple.
I don't leave out scenery and background because I don't know how to draw it, although that's one advantage, because I'm not very good at drawing scenery and background.
But I would become good at it if it mattered.
I prefer that the characters are really just the scenery themselves.
So they may have a coffee cup or a laptop or something, but I don't give them much stuff because I don't want your brain to be looking at the picture and it would slow down your flow of reading the dialogue.
So as an artistic choice, I simplify the pictures to the characters.
I make the characters stereotypical and ones that you recognize, so that when you see Dilbert or Dilbert's boss or Alice or any of them, if you follow the strip, you know immediately who they are.
That saves me a lot of time.
I don't have to explain who the characters are because you come to it already knowing that.
And then I leave out the background so you're not slowed down in your processing of it.
You go right to the character.
Oh, it's Dilber. I know everything about Dilber.
What's he saying? So I want to get right to it.
Because in comedy, timing is important.
So if I slow you down with some detailed scenery...
You will not get the timing that I want you to have.
Alright, so I'm going to have the boss.
He's central to this.
So he's going to be sitting here and he's going to be on his phone.
So I'm sort of roughing out what it would look like for the boss to be on his phone.
And by the way, there are very few things that are annoying to draw.
As somebody holding a phone.
Because drawing this part of your arm and what it's supposed to look like when you're on the phone is one of those things that you don't notice as much.
Somebody's mentioning the iPad Pro.
I have the iPad Pro.
You're actually watching this Periscope from the iPad Pro.
Now, I know what you're going to say.
It's got a stylus. You can draw on it, and it's pretty cool.
It's all true. But it's also this big, right?
Drawing on something this big is going to be an order of magnitude harder than Than drawing on something this big.
And when I said I'm probably going to, well I am going to upgrade to the next bigger one of these, it's only going to add a little bit.
But that little bit, that little bit that the next bigger size adds Probably would add something like 25% to my productivity because, you know, when you're doing this kind of drawing, you're moving stuff around a lot.
You're moving windows to draw and then you got to pick something and move something and find something and, you know, merge one file with another.
So there's a lot of Real estate you need.
And just getting a little bit more real estate can have a gigantic impact on productivity.
So that's why the iPad is a wonderful device, but it's more of a hobbyist, toy, on the road, fun kind of thing.
Whereas if you're doing serious drawing and art, essentially 100% of all artists who do digital art are using the same device.
So let me say that again.
Pretty much 100% of commercial artists who are doing any kind of real work for pay are using essentially exactly this setup.
Now, they may be using other software.
I use Photoshop, but at least they're using that as well as whatever else they're using.
All right, so here's the boss. He's sitting here.
He's on his phone. Maybe he's got one hand on the table like he's not so happy.
So I'm just roughing out what that would look like and I know he's talking.
Well, I'll indicate so I don't forget who's talking that he's there.
Then I'm going to check the rest of the...
I have to zoom out to look at the rest of the composition because I want to figure out who's going to be talking later.
Because I don't want to create a picture in which it will be hard to depict somebody talking later.
So now I remind myself who's talking.
This will be a cutaway to Alice.
So I'll just rough that out so I know that's Alice with her big hair.
She's going to be on the phone too, so she'll have a phone.
I hate drawing phones.
I think I mentioned that. So I'm going to have a lot of phones in this one.
We're going to go back to the boss.
We'll give him a different look.
He'll be in the middle this time.
So that's what the boss is.
Then back to...
Maybe I might even stay on the boss a little bit.
Maybe I'll give a little different look.
I'll give him more of a close-up maybe.
No, I'll probably change that.
So here's the backup tool.
So, I've got one of my buttons programmed on my programmable device over here that I showed you earlier, and so I can back up easily, because I didn't like the composition.
Now, I'm going to go back and add in some other characters, but I want to make sure I get the speaking characters right, and then I'll build in the people around them as needed.
Alright, so it's the boss and the boss.
I know this is going to be a straight on view, this is going to be a straight on view, and probably that's going to be a straight on view.
I think I will make this an exterior scene.
You're probably wondering, why do I sometimes draw an exterior of the building they're in?
And the answer is that it breaks up the picture.
So if most of my cartoons are a bunch of people talking to each other at the office, and you get blind to people talking, you need something to break it up.
So I often add a building.
So I'll fill that building in later, but I give it a little perspective, remind myself what I mean.
And I can only add the exterior.
When you can tell from the context that the person speaking is the person I want you to know is speaking.
So because this is a continuation of a conversation that's going back and forth, The reader will know that since the boss is first hearing Alice talk and then he talks and Alice talks, you're set up to understand that when I go to the exterior, you know it's Alice's...
I'm sorry, it's the boss's turn to talk.
So I can get away with changing the picture to an exterior as long as it's obvious.
To my audience who would be talking, because there's a little talking balloon that comes off of that.
Alright, so...
I don't have anybody else talking, except in the end, Dilbert's going to be doing a...
what I call an afterglow line.
The afterglow...
This is a term that I brought to cartooning.
I don't know if any other cartoonist has ever used this term in cartooning.
But the afterglow is the panel after the joke.
So the joke is sort of the punchline, if you will.
It's going to happen before the end.
And then the end is just going to be one of the character's Giving you a little extra.
So it's the punchline.
I could have ended there. Easily that could be the end.
And most cartoonists would end with a punchline.
I always take it to the afterglow because you get a little extra.
A little bit extra. So that's where that's going to be.
So this will be the first time That Dilbert talks, and he's going to be looking in this direction, so I just remind myself that there's going to be a Dilbert there, and he's going to be about that big, and he's going to be in roughly that position.
You don't need to see what I'm drawing.
I'm just roughing out a Dilbert.
Well, actually, I'll blow it up, see if you can come close.
So you can see that, you know, I didn't necessarily need to give him any ears or anything.
I'm really just getting the size.
So I want to know what position he's in, blah, blah, blah.
Now remember, everything I'm drawing now is going to be in the rough draft layer that gets deleted later.
So I actually would have, you know, I'm just showing you the process here.
I wouldn't have completed the first positioning sketch even to that level of detail normally.
It would be less. So I didn't like where he is, so I'm moving him down a little bit.
I'll probably adjust all that several times.
Then I've got Alice saying something over here.
She's going to be here. And Alice will be...
I've got to go back.
Now, one of the things you have to learn is when you're doing text, you're on different layers than when you're drawing.
And every time you cut and paste, you add a new layer and you can easily get confused what layer you're on.
So you continuously have to ask yourself before applying a tool, am I on the right layer?
Which it takes a long time to learn.
So it takes a long time to automatically pick a tool and then before you use it say, am I on the right layer?
And I still, you'll see me be on the wrong layer even during this demonstration a whole bunch of times.
All right. So now I can see that the boss would have been in the middle.
He's going to be below the table here.
And here we're going to have Dilbert looking to the side again.
Here we're going to have the boss looking No, we're not going to have the boss doing that.
In this panel, something dramatic is going to happen.
Alice's hair is going to turn into a big fist and it's going to punch the boss because that's what a really bad hair day looks like.
So I'll just block that out so I can remember it.
And then I'll have...
Folks sitting at the table, and then we'll have the boss recognize that Alice has entered the room.
He'll just be looking in this direction, and then we'll have Alice.
At first, she's standing, and she'll be looking at him.
She'll have an angry look on her face with bad hair.
She'll be reaching over and grabbing the chair because I'm indicating that she's just walked in and she's going to grab that chair.
Now that I know where everybody is, I can go back and sort of plop them in as just placeholders so I know that there's an empty chair there.
And there, and I know we've got Alice.
Alright, so now I've done the first draft.
I'm going to click on that layer that has all the drawing I've done so far, which are just placeholders.
And I'm going to lower the opacity.
It's going to make it less opaque, meaning that it probably disappeared on your screen.
Now, I can see what I wrote, but it's too light for you to see.
And the reason I've lightened it is because I'm going to be adding things on top of it, and I'm just using it as sort of a guide to where to put things.
So the first thing I might add would be some lines to indicate the table.
So I pick the line tool and I just approximately follow the line I had before and just pick two points and drag it and you've got a table.
It doesn't take long, except I missed my connection there.
So I delete that.
Zoom in so I don't make the same mistake again.
And there's a table.
Then I'm going to be creating dialog boxes.
Before I show you this, let me say that I am completely aware that what I'm going to do next is an inefficient process.
And then if I spend some amount of time, I could make this a lot better process.
But I choose not to do that because there's something about what I'm doing now, as inefficient as it is, Somehow I enjoy and gives me a mental break from the process of creating to do something mindless for a moment.
And here's what I'm doing.
So I used the line tool to put the outlines of something like a balloon, a speaking balloon, a speech balloon to the boss.
Now, I just combined those layers so that they'll act as one.
So all the lines around this act as one, but I don't have corners.
If I try to draw those corners in by hand, it's going to make me crazy.
So what I do is I have a file that has nothing but balloon corners.
It's got a sample balloon.
Yeah, I know if I were using not Photoshop, I could use different software and I could just grab that balloon and reshape it.
But again, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm doing it inefficiently for a reason.
It's part of sort of an overall creative process of thinking and acting and resting.
So the resting is part of the process too.
So I copied a corner from my file.
I'm going to drag it over there and just discovered that I used the wrong size line.
So I'm not going to apply that.
I'm going to get rid of that layer.
So what I mean is that the lines I put around the box I thought were a number 9, but I accidentally had it set on a 7.
So those lines weren't the same thickness as the corners I was going to connect.
And so I've got to go back and find...
Now one of the things that Photoshop does that's maddening is it It hides.
I can't tell you how long I've spent looking for this, as long as I've used Photoshop, which is 25 years.
Every now and then there's a prompt that disappears.
And sometimes it's just gone.
And I can spend an hour looking for The box to put in the brush size.
There we are. Alright.
Oh no, that wasn't it.
There it is. So I had to have the line tool selected and that made the prompt show up after I made sure I didn't have it covered.
Now I've got size of width 9.
I'm going to put back the balloon size.
I'm holding a button to tell it to draw it straight as opposed to diagonal.
And then I'm going to combine those layers and that becomes all part of the background layer.
And then...
I should also say that anybody who is really good at Photoshop is probably...
Jesus...
Is probably gagging right now.
Because... I'm not doing things in necessarily the most...
Obvious or efficient ways.
I'm aware of that and I would change it if it mattered.
All right, so I've just added a corner to that balloon.
I won't make you watch while I do the rest.
You can see that that's how the balloons get made.
I'll just add the other four corners later.
Here's the part I wanted to show you.
It's because somebody asked yesterday.
The next phase, I have a bunch of templates for the characters' heads.
So here I've opened up, let me make it bigger so you can see.
This is a bunch of templates for the boss's head.
So they don't have expressions, they just have the basic head shape.
That's because if you draw the same basic head shapes over and over again, it makes you crazy.
And it's actually one of the hardest things to draw.
So drawing Dilbert's head or Wally or the boss, their heads are all interesting Non-standard shapes, so it just saves me a bunch of time if I start with a template.
Now the template that I put in is not the final art.
That too is just the next level of draft.
So I look at my positions and I say to myself, well that looks like a boss who is roughly in this position.
And so I copy that and put it in And then I make it the right size, so I've got to shrink it, and then I've got to twist it, and then I've got to stick it on there, like that.
And then, I accidentally covered up this, so I have to delete a little bit so I'm not writing over the line I just put there.
These, I make sure I don't put with my final layer.
I move them up to my draft layers.
Oops, because that's where they belong.
Alright, now since most of the rest of the process is just more of this until we get to the coloring phase, the coloring phase I would just change this art into bitmap first to get rid of all the edges, change it back to To grayscale and then change it again from grayscale to CMYK. None of this means anything to you unless you know how to use Photoshop.
And then I could just use the bucket tool to point and click and fill in the layers.
Fill in the colors. So the coloring is easy.
You don't need to see. So I've got a boss here with a little example.
Thing going on here.
Let me see. Here's a layer problem.
I forgot to combine layers, so I was on the wrong layer.
And that... I have to back up from that because I still have this layer in...
I'm gonna actually make all the layers solid for a while.
There's a reason. All right.
So, now everything here is a draft.
Now here's the hard part.
I have to figure out how to get the boss on a cell phone.
And the problem is that a cell phone is small and it's mostly hidden by your hand.
So, I don't know if you can see this process.
Let's see. Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger.
So I probably wouldn't normally draw at this scale.
Alright. So this is...
I might draw a little bit smaller than this normally, and then it gets shrunk down when it's printed.
So, here's the hardest thing I draw.
Oh, and to make this look like a phone from the back, you could just give it the little I'm a phone camera button indication there.
Now, How do you draw an arm that's sort of coming toward you but coming off the person?
Does that look like it?
Now you're going to see that even a professional cartoonist does a lot of trial and error.
So for me, drawing is a lot of, well, does it look like that?
Does it look like that?
If you were looking at it from that angle, would it look like that?
What would it look like? So you have to actually...
This process is a process of actually pulling yourself out of your environment and for a moment imagining yourself in this imaginary world where you're looking at a character who's on the phone and then you're trying to see it first.
And once you see it, you try to translate that onto the page and say, okay, this is what I'm seeing.
I'm looking right at his elbow so I can't tell that the elbow is connected.
So it's going to be sort of like that.
And then there's a chair behind him.
And then I just fill in some of the details.
I always have them wearing their IDs.
Now this part of the boss was just a placeholder.
You can still see it, right?
This is where the boss's body is.
I don't like that line.
Make him a little chubbier.
Then we've got his hand out here.
That's his sleeve.
And now we'll give him hands.
He's got chubby little fingers.
Alright, we'll back...
Whoops, hello. Then we'll...
Get back in there. Get back in there.
So there's a lot of zooming in and zooming out.
So when you zoom out, you could get a better picture of whether you got the perspective right.
And in this case, I did not.
So there's something weird about that line.
So I'm going to get rid of it.
From the angle that you're looking at it, it's not as obvious that I needed to do that.
But trust me, if you're looking at it straight on, it didn't make sense.
Alright, now, most of the art of cartooning is about expressions.
If you get the expressions right, you know, the eyes and the mouth, you're 80% of a cartoonist.
So, here the boss is a little angry at Alice.
I'm getting rid of some stray lines here.
And so, I like to give him the angry eyes.
Where they're just straight lines with little dots.
So the actual eye is...
He's so angry, his eyes are small.
And his mouth is a little bit turned down, like that, to indicate that he's sort of unhappy while he's talking.
Alright, so that's what one character would look like.
When I'm done with drawing this character, I will go...
I will lighten it again, make it a lower level...
Layer. I'll take my final layer, and I'll go in tight.
That wasn't what I had in mind.
I'll go in about this tightness, and then this would be the final layer.
Now, I usually wait till I have all of the first rough in, but I'll just give you the idea.
All right, so if this were my final layer, The brush would be too small for this.
I'm going to bump it up to 10.
Size 10. Now drawing a smooth oval is actually one of the hardest things you can do.
So drawing any of the characters' noses or heads are kind of challenging.
So if you'd like a good dose of inspiration, Watch how hard it is for me to do the simplest tasks that I do for my job, and watch how many times I'll have to do it before I'm happy with it.
Now, imagine that I've been doing this for 30 years, So if you try to draw a character and you say, ah, I've tried this 10 times and haven't gotten it right.
I've been doing this 30 years, the same stupid drawings, and it still takes me 10 times to make sure that I like the line.
Now, some lines are easy and some are hard.
I'll show you the hard ones in a moment.
Noses are hard. But I kind of nailed it on the first try.
All right, so I may have exaggerated.
So, you can get away with some imperfection in the zoomed-in version, because when people see it, it's going to be much smaller, and any imperfection in that nose would be unnoticed, as long as you've got the major line looking right.
Alright, so I nailed that. So I told you there are some lines that are hard and some that are easy.
This line below is an easy line, because I don't need to lift my hand, and it's not an arc.
So, well, I'm going to lift my hand, but, alright, I told you it was easy, and then I messed it up, because I had an artifact there.
Alright, so typically the easy lines, and especially the ones that don't have to be exact, like the boss's hair, pretty much I will draw that correctly on the first try.
This line of his head is a tough one.
I got that close enough.
These lines are easy.
Very easy.
The boss's hair is easy.
His mouth is easy.
This line is easy.
So the rest is easy.
So the hardest two lines were the slope of his head and the circle that forms his nose.
Now, if I were to complete this, I would just continue on and put them all together.
Let me show you how I make these exterior buildings.
You've seen the exterior of Dilber's building probably so many times, and you say to yourself, oh, you just cut and paste it.
But I don't. And there's a reason.
I literally draw every one of these exterior buildings from scratch, even though they look the same.
And the reason is, they don't look the same.
So your eye will not get as used to the Dilbert comic over time if I allow the art and the look to drift.
So the early way the characters look is very different than the way they look now.
And that's not unusual in comics.
They will start with a certain look and they'll sort of evolve over time.
If I cut and paste, the evolving stops.
So even though I'm starting with templates to just make it easier to do this, I still do the final layer by hand because that allows it to drift.
And it's the drift that makes it art.
If I did cut and paste it, your brain would detect that after a while.
So it's the imperfections that make it interesting, which is hard to learn.
All right, so here's what I'm drawing this building.
Oops, got the wrong tool.
I want to use the line tool.
And I just start a beginning and an end point.
Yeah, let's see. I don't know if you'll be able to see this too clearly.
But I first start with the outline of the building.
I give it a little bit of dimensionality there, so it looks like you're on the ground looking up a little bit.
And then, over time, I've figured out a design that has some detail on it, but it's still easy to draw.
And you'll see that I'm first putting sort of a general shape to it, and then I'll put in a few windows.
I don't put individual windows because office buildings don't often have those.
But now each of these has to be exactly the right start and finish to be compatible with the fact that you're looking up.
So I'm not trying to be parallel.
I'm trying to distort the perspective the same way that you would see it if you were from the ground.
Now, if you were to try to draw this as quickly as I am on the first try, you would be very frustrated because this is very hard to do and it takes a long time to learn to do it this quickly.
Now, I'm going to draw a second line just to give some Shape and dimensionality to it.
So this would suggest that when you're looking up you're seeing some edges from this direction and maybe some shadow or some edges that you would not see from another angle.
So this just gives it just a little bit of an accent so it doesn't look flat.
So, again, I don't want to add too much detail because I don't want to fatigue the person looking at it, and I don't want to ruin the timing of the dialogue.
I want to get to it fast, but give it a little bit of texture, a little bit of life.
All right, so here are the other scenes.
I'm going to wait on this. So, and then I save my work periodically.
I think you can see the whole process now.
Somebody says, did I ever take drafting?
No, but interestingly enough, that's the oddest question because the answer is so interesting.
So the question was, have I ever taken a drafting class?
Because somebody thought my strokes were controlled, I guess.
My grandfather Who I am named after, my middle name anyway, he's named after him, apparently was exactly like me.
Meaning my personality.
So my mother says that my grandfather was just like me.
Now, I never met him because he died the year that I was born.
But he was a draftsman.
So my grandfather, who I'm told I'm just like, who I never met, so he didn't ever influence me in person, was a draftsman.
Now, is it a coincidence that someone who was a draftsman has someone later in the family who is also an artist?
Well, turns out my mother was a landscape artist.
You can see one of her works on the wall there.
So, my mother is deceased.
But she did lots of commercial landscapes in her small town and sold basically every painting she made.
So I have, on one side, I've got the drafting skill.
On the other side, I've got another kind of artist.
So the odds that I'd have some artistic talent were pretty high.
My sister, also an artist.
And so it's no surprise.
All right. Let's see.
How long have you been digital?
I think 2004?
I don't know. Long time.
So maybe 10 or 15 years, 12 years.
Something like that.
Any other questions?
So we'll upload this on Periscope.
Somebody's saying, do I do one per day?
I do one per day on average.
But I batch up my work.
So I might have a day where I'm writing, a day when I'm drawing, that sort of thing.
It's easier to write in certain parts of the day, and it's easier to draw in other parts of the day.
So it's easier to write in the morning when my brain is fresh, but I'm drinking coffee and I'm kind of hyper in the morning.
It's not good for drawing because you want your hand to be calm and your body to be calm to get the most clean lines.
So I prefer drawing either before I've had my coffee, or at least much of it, or the afternoon after exercise is ideal.
The very best time for me to draw is an hour or two after I've exercised when my body is relaxed.
Was it hard to go from paper to computer?
It was challenging.
I'm not sure hard is exactly the right word.
I had enough incentive to do it that I put in the time one needs because, you know, it's my job.
If it were my hobby, I don't know, maybe it'd be a little too hard and I would have said, ah, heck with this.
But because it's my job...
I, of course, dove in and put in the amount of work that one does for a job.
And that was very manageable.
But let me explain that a little bit.
Drawing is sort of a Zen-like process where you're just like, oh, let's do you and the paper and the pen or the pencil.
And you can really kind of get into a mindset when you're drawing that can be very enjoyable.
People who are artists probably know what I'm talking about.
But, when you're drawing on the computer, it's sort of a hybrid between what I just described, the fun of putting the lines on paper, and typing and coding.
Because your brain has to keep going back and forth between the tools that you're using, you know, push this button, slide this, hold this while you're moving this, you know, copy what layer I'm on.
So the amount of mental processing to use the Wacom is probably...
I don't know, 10 to 20 times more mental requirement than just drawing on a piece of paper.
And the only thing you have to get wrong is like, well, I guess I'll have to erase that.
But what you get in return is way better art.
You have more options.
You can do things that would just be too hard manually.
You can add shading and tone and texture easily.
But more importantly...
It probably reduced my workload by well over half.
So the time it takes me to make a comic with the technology It's got to be at least 100% faster.
And if time matters to you, then that's the preferred thing.
So, if all you want to do is enjoy the feeling of being an artist, well, maybe a canvas and a piece of paper are just what you need.
Nothing wrong with that.
But if you're a professional and your time matters and you're being paid for Creation, you want to free up as much time, use your hand as little as possible, conserve your resources, then the technology is the only way to go.
It's called a Wacom Cintiq.
Yeah, it's a Wacom, W-A-C-O-M, and uses a stylus to draw.
When will this comic be published?
July 28th, 2019.
How has the current business environment changed your approach Well, of course, like everything else in the world, I have to watch out for the new red lines about what you cannot say and the exact words you need.
And even though my job is mocking things that are Maybe not as useful as whoever invented and thought they would be.
Even I don't unnecessarily annoy my audience.
So, you know, one of the hardest things to do as a creator is to understand that you're creating a product and you have customers and you're working for them.
So if you're working for the audience, It doesn't make sense for you to also annoy them with your own weird thoughts on things that they're not going to appreciate.
I save the weird thoughts for Periscope.
No, Dale is not my middle name.
Do you defend your copyright?
Yes. In all the normal ways.
Now, it turns out that Defending my copyright is part of the job of the publishers and the syndication companies.
So there are people in place to do that.
And it's not really...
When somebody says, do I defend my copyright?
I don't defend it against audience, people, the public sharing it with their friends.
So technically it would be illegal.
Technically it would be illegal.
For you to say, hey, here's my favorite Dilbert, and put it on social media.
Technically. Technically illegal.
You're never going to have a problem with that.
If you put two of them up, then you're a publisher.
Now, you wouldn't get in trouble for two, and you wouldn't get in trouble if several times during the year, or even several times during the month, you said, oh, I really like this comic, I want to share it on social media.
I'm okay with that. It's technically illegal.
I'm okay with it.
I like that you like it.
That's as far as it goes.
It's not about the extra attention.
It's not about somebody's using it without my permission.
It's just, I like that you like it.
These are not big deals.
But if you started your own Twitter account to publish my comic every day, Or you try to monetize it by publishing it every day, then you're a publisher.
And then my publisher goes after you because they say, we have a contract with this cartoonist and we are the only publisher.
The Raptors and the Warriors are playing?
Well, I'll have to go watch that.
I think that's all for now.
I'm going to stop here.
Thanks for watching this.
I'll talk to you later.
Oh, go to Dilbert.com if you want to see Dilbert.
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