Shiny Happy Cartoons...

I'm still going back over my archive of cartoons and re-colouring them and cleaning them up as a lot of the early stuff looks like this:

Grainy, discoloured and rather anaemic in the colour strength. Frankly I don't like it. This is because when I first started out I had an old and wheezing scanner, unlike the Star Trek touch-screen one I now have which comes with so much fancy wireless technology that I think can actually scan and beam the cartoons directly into your head. But as I still haven't figured that feature out yet I suppose looking at cartoons will have to do.

I don't want to re-draw them because I'm happy with the way they're drawn, so I'm going back over pretty much the whole lot and giving them bright and shiny new colours and removing all the graininess so that the above cartoon now looks like this:

Exactly the same, except more crisp, vivid and 'HD ready'. It's sort of like when George Lucas went back and polished Star Wars back in '97 - y'know, before he got all crazy with the CGI. It was still the same film - it just looked better.

It's also in keeping with my new style of colouring where I give things more shadow and depth. Some people have said I shouldn't re-colour them and that I should keep them the way they are so that I and others can see how my cartooning style has changed over the years. I can see that they have a point, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist and like all the cartoons to have the same look to them. It just neatens the whole lot up and means that when presented together they look better and like part of a collection. It's a bit like a writer coming back to a half finished novel and writing the last half in a slightly different style to the first otherwise.