New Tablet!

Since the next semester of college at Sheridan is gonna be from home due to COVID and all that, I’ve had to get a Wacom One Creative Pen Display Tablet– y’know, the kind where you can draw right on the screen. My previous one couldn’t do that and it just wasn’t gonna cut it for what I’d need for the school year. Too primitive.

I was gonna have to get one of these in the future anyways, so why not sooner than later? Anyways, setting it up was a pain in the anus (turns out my laptop doesn’t have an HDMI port, so I had to order an adapter for that), but the little snot is up and running now! I did a quick-ish test drawing to figure it out:

Anyways, here are my initial thoughts: this thing is great! What a godsend. My one complaint is that the brush thickness tends to lean to the extremes– like, if I press lighter, the line barely registers. I think this is just something that I’ve gotta get used too, though; after a few weeks I’m sure I won’t even notice anymore. Maybe I just have to calibrate it?

Mighty Mouse Drawing

I’ve been watching a lot of the original TerryToons lately. There’s a YouTube channel that’s uploaded most, if not all of them.

They’re pretty fascinating. With a few exceptions, most of them aren’t all that well-written or anything, but visually they’re a lot of fun to look at. There are a lot of great character designs and fun bits of animation and movement. Check ’em out!

Yogi and Boo-Boo Drawing

I’ve been on a big Hanna-Barbera kick as of late.

I mean, I’ve been a big dork for their stuff for quite literally as long as I can remember, but recently I’ve been reminding myself of why I love those toons so much. I’ve been seeking out some of the HB DVDs I’ve been missing, as well as tracking down what’s not “officially” available yet online (don’t tell the cops).

I think Mr. Jinks is probably my favorite HB character, but Yogi Bear is pretty close to the top of that list– and he’s a lot of fun to draw, too. So I took a stab at doing my own take on the Yogster, as well as his faithful companion, Boo Boo.

A lot of the older HB cartoons are illustrated with these beautiful, thicker outlines, and I’m trying to get into the habit of using those a bit more… so I figured, why not practice here? It took me way longer than it usually does to complete a drawing, but I’m actually pretty satisfied with the way it turned out here (at least until I inevitably turn on the drawing like I do with all my art and start noticing stuff I coulda done better).

You might’ve noticed that I changed up the characters’ color palettes a bit… a lot of old HB merchandise tended to have the characters colored in wrong for whatever reason (I have a few theories), and I’ve always got a kick out of that. It’s pretty interesting to try other color combos on iconic character designs and see how they turn out. Yogi’s hat and tie being blue and pink respectively was inspired by this piece of merch I found a photo of online not too long ago:

Image courtesy of *Yowp* (https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2019/07/buy-huck-buy-often.html).

One other change-up from Yogi’s best-known design is that I put some of Yogi’s snout color around his eyes. In some of the earliest Yogi shorts, he had this, and I wanted to play around with integrating that element of his appearance into my drawing.

It reminds me of Mickey Mouse.

I actually went back and forth a lot between that design and the more traditional one. I settled on the former, but here’s a version with the latter just because I’m spineless: