Happy Monday, happy August. A few things about this week’s strips: I thought drawing them was a breeze. I wrote the dialog backwards, so I had the punchline for the page and worked from there. Except, I had writers block. Generally I know what I want to happen, I know there has to be cues and dialog to advance the plot along with setting up the jokes, and there has to be jokes. Welp, that all became impossible for Monday & Tuesday’s strips. And I usually ink the figures AFTER I do the dialog. So, lesson learned. And then as I was editing, I realized I left out some background details – like all the background details, because I was waiting to put in the word balloons. As you’ll see, we’re in the bureaucrat’s office again. I should name him.

AND, right after creating this post on Saturday, I realized the 2nd panel had an error, “you cop buddy” instead of “your cop buddy” Rather than load up old computer with the old but handy art program I am too cheap to replace, I waited until Sunday morning (yesterday) to fire up Krita on the new computer and draw it in. The drawback is saving the file, having these ghost files that save it as “(file).png.png” and then making sure it’s saved b&w instead of color. It’s all going to get edited again but I haven’t altered Mal & Dee strips this way so it’s good practice. Anyway, taken care of now, and that goes for tomorrow’s strip. Not seen here is that I also added a silhouette of buildings in the background in the first panel on the main file that will appear in print. Because rather than save and shrink and add watermark, I just updated all three files related to this strip, but for the smaller file web version, I just altered “your cop buddy.”

Usually the desk has no screentone, but I added it this time because I want to highlight what Mal is looking at n the last panel. I also am trying out new a new pen brand, Artline (by Shachihatra). They only had two sizes at the art store. They’re clean and don’t leave the concave indentation at the end of each line especially in the lettering, where that shows up the most with my other pens. Anyway, see you tomorrow.