This week’s homework assignment is to draw another species. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to go to the zoo or something, but if not there’s always these post-run sketches of off-leash pooches in Central Park. They move a bit too quickly for me to really study them, though.

Getting started on some more animation practice; Mary Rae sees a bug on the table and smashes it. Today I sketched a few thumbnail poses, and also plotted the timing on a stripped-down exposure sheet on the right side of my page. Boring spreadsheets may seem antithetical to spontaneous-looking animation, but it really just serves the necessary purpose of timing your character’s actions; how you choose to excute those actions is what brings the character to life.

No time to draw something tonight, I’m playing some silly Facebook game.

Well, I guess the Kerkel posts this week were a wake of sorts; my strip’s been eliminated from the competition. On the upside, I’m now free to share the entire run here on the site. It was an odd contest; the thing I found especially strange is that there is no real feedback or interaction on the Cartoonist Studio site, so I feel like I haven’t really learned much about what constitutes an appealing comic strip.