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. The 11-second animation contest made a lot more sense, and I got some solid constructive criticism from the community. About the only positive thing I can say about this contest is that it motivated me to create a comic strip!

That said, after looking through these, please let me know which one you liked the least, and which one you liked the best. Now that I’ve got the storyline-introducing awkwardness out of the way, I’d really like to continue developing these characters.

Drawn on my new iPad of course. It’s a marvelous content creation device (I’m even dictating this!), but I must admit that using it for drawing doesn’t make as much sense as I thought it did when I bought my original iPad about a year and a half ago.

Much like doodling on an Etch-a-Sketch, there’s a certain pleasure in overcoming the iPad’s inherent limitations to produce a competent drawing. All iPads thus far have been designed to register relatively imprecise input from your fat fingers. The basic workaround is to draw as zoomed-in as possible, but sometimes it can be tough to draw without seeing the entire picture at once. Your mileage may vary, but unfortunately for me, this rules out the iPad as a sketchbook for quick ideas or gesture sketches.

Incidentally, many of my drawing apps actually seem to be extra laggy on my otherwise zippy new toy, which I hope are just growing pains resulting from the awesome new display resolution.

Art-wise, I think where the iPad really shines is painting; you can’t beat the massive color pallete, and if you paint in large areas of color/tone and work your way into the details, you don’t necessarily have to do a lot of zooming until the very end.

I’m holding out hope for some sort of accessory or software that will tear me away from my real paper sketchbook, but so far Apple doesn’t seem very interested in latching onto my market segment. But all of my artsy e-books look great!

The usual coffee shop sketches. If they look a little sloppier than usual, it’s because I’m really trying to sketch without looking at the paper. It allows me to capture fleeting motion that would otherwise pass me by if I were to focus on drawing instead of on seeing.

Must be Kerkel week. I thought I’d throw out a little reminder that the retarded protracted comic strip contest is STILL going on. Click here

I think this week’s episode is my favorite; every panel with Kerkel makes me laugh, and I drew the darn thing. (That probably means this is the week I’ll be eliminated.)