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.
Post-It Note Art. These'll keep appearing more and more as I learn how to live my life off Post-Its when I'm at work... Well, they can't all be boring messages and reminders...
Paper weapons of Mass Destruction, where I got my moral compass, and as ever, there's 100 points and much respect if you know which TV show has been quoted in the blog title (big clue: it spawned 33 and 1/3 films)
1. Fat Daddy: Last week I learned how to make origami water bombs. Cue much wet fun. But as ever, I soon got bored and decided to test the boundaries of paper construction by building incresingly bigger ones, resulting first in the 'Harlequin' (named after its jaunty colour scheme), and then in the Oppenheimer of origami water bombs. I present to you: 'Fat Daddy'...
Magnificent, isn't he?
Actually, this is 'Fat Daddy Mk II'. The first 'Fat Daddy' broke apart in my hands as I was transporting it to the test ground, releasing 2 pints of water onto the hallway carpet. Ooops! Still, 'Fat Daddy Mk II' has been reinforced with sturdier paper to prevent such a mishap occuring. Oh, and you heard right - this bad boy holds 2 whole English pints in his mighty belly. Testing occurred successfully today, and the whole of my village was washed away as a result. Good work, Fat Daddy! (salutes). I'd make an even bigger one, but I think I'd be straying into 'Paper Lantern' territory...
2. The Moral of the Story: Did anyone else who grew up in the UK ever watch/see Tales of Aesop? This was my favourite show when I was just a gurgling little infant. It's just a shame they only made 13 episodes of it. Tales of Aesop was narrated and voiced entirely by the legend that is Tom 'The Doctor' Baker, which makes this all the better. It had characters with great names like Mrs. Bite the wolf, Geraldine Donkey, and Boris the Lion, and there's something so home-spun and hand-crafted about it all that you'd have to have a heart of stone not to love it. Honestly, this is classic TV. I'm going to make my kids watch this. How else will they learn what's right and wrong in this world unless a talking lion helps tell them? My entire moral compass was gained from watching this show... plus, it's hilarious to hear Tom Baker voicing a cockney lady wolf.
So I hope you all know what to do the next time you're involved in a dispute over sausages or any other item of charcuterie.
3. Parker: Normally graphic novel adaptations of books are terrible, but I've been reading an adaptation of Richard Stark's gritty crime novel 'Parker: The Hunter', drawn by my favourite comic book artist/author Darwyn Cooke. It's a fantastic piece of work that combines a cool 60s 'Mad Men' look with a grim noir storyline and some shockingly brutal (but not gratuitous) violence. Even though it's done in just pen and blue ink it looks fantastic, which pages I would happily put in a frame and hang on my wall. The novel has been translated really well to a visial form in both action and story. Parker is a really great anti-hero and while you never really like him, you definitely find yourself rooting for him as he hits New York looking for revenge. The publishers IDW have a great 20-something page preview which is worth looking at just for the first page and its first line. Take a look HERE
4. Twitter: Apparently Twitter went down for a few hours today (Facebook did too. Grrr!) due to some kind of cyber-attack. I just loved the irony of thousands of really ardent hard-core Twitterers wanting to tell each other and complain to each other that Twitter wasn't working, only for them to have no Twitter platform to be able to do it on. D'oh!
5. Paper Titanic: I just learned how to make an origami sampan (a flat bottomed boat). Will this lead to me making a paper sampan large enough for me to sit in? A Fat Boaty, perhaps? Almost certainly. I'll keep you updated on how it goes. Invites to the ship's christening for its maiden voyage will be in the post.
I always imagined Godzilla to have marital problems. He has a lot of aggression. But even city destroying monsters need to take a coffee break too, whether they're tearing down buildings or battling other giant radioactive reptiles. It's just common sense.
I've been practicing drawing people lately as it's not one of my strong points. Sure, if you need a talking beer bottle or an anthropomorphic book I'm your man, but I'm rarely satisfied with the people I've drawn, and there are a couple of people-featuring 'Too Close For Comfort' cartoons I've wanted to draw for a while now but haven't been able to because the humans I've drawn have looked rubbish. However drawing normal people is boring - far better to practice by drawing super-heroes, which are much more fun and mean I can test our different face and body shapes (wait 'til you see Superman - he's super-buff!).
Yes, welcome, to the 'Too Close for Comfort'blog and archive; the home of all my cartoons, scribblings, Grandpa T-Rex cartoons, and 'Rob's Random 5'.
In this blog you'll find cartoons about anything and everything...except the stuff I haven't drawn yet, such as pomegranates, sacks of charcoal, and squirrels. Still, you never know, they might turn up one day. Although even by my standards a cartoon featuring all three would be pretty weird...
'Grandpa T-Rex' has featured quite prominently lately, and if you want to catch up with all his antics you can either find them all under the 'Grandpa T-Rex' label or on the 'Museum of Grandpa T-Rex' page.
Anyway, take a look around, enjoy, (feel free to comment, good or bad, on anything you see) and report back to me when it makes sense. The Commissions page is now active, for those of you who want any cartooning doing. If you do fancy getting in touch, send 140 characters my way at @robsmedley86
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. 
