#43: Pulling heartstrings and freeing hands
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This week we have something that will pull your heartstrings, and a dilemma that certain dinosaurs face.
Kicking against extinction,
Chris
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Caption: N/A
This is a new one for me, an actual comic, of sorts.
Pulling heartstrings is a pastime for everyone. We all know what it means, except perhaps our world weary heart who is simply stuck with having to deal with this metaphor. So, what happens when the brain asks for those metaphorical heartstrings to be pulled? Chaos.
It’s been a long time between comics for me. Should I do more?
A little artist’s note: This came about when I had an idea that needed a back and forth dialog to work. It wouldn’t work in a single panel, but it might work as a comic. But, as anyone who has been seeing these cartoons for a while would note, comics aren’t really something I’ve done a lot of.
The challenge here was how to build a simple convention for comics - specifically font choice, speech lines, cell lines, and level of detail - that would work easily and still fit within my drawing style. To do this, I tried a few different things, from an enormous amount of shading to shading just the lines. In the end, I settled on this combination, which is similar to my current single-panel style, but that includes a few new conventions that I hope to use again.
Caption: “My hands are free, but still useless.”
Getting tied to a tree is hard going. But it’s especially hard if you’re a T-Rex.
Because, say you manage to get yourself free. Then you manage to get those hands waving. Can they reach the rope around your waist? The answer is probably no.
Sometimes it’s hard to be a T-Rex.
A little artist’s note: I’ve wanted to do a T-Rex joke like this for a while.
In earlier versions of this idea, I toyed with the idea of a T-Rex knitting, but it just never quite stuck for me. So when I came upon the idea of the T-Rex being tied up, mafia style, I jumped at the chance. Well, perhaps not jumped, but certainly moved quickly towards it.
The challenge with this cartoon was around getting the composition right. Because you need to show a lot with very little. On top of this, there was a challenge around how high the rope would be because, as you would guess, T-Rexes only kind of look like this. As I seriously doubt that they were this adorable in real life. This also means that these dinosaurs aren’t really anatomically correct, and T-Rexes probably don’t actually sit this way, and so getting the rope in the right place on these almost-accurate dinosaurs was a bit of a challenge.
Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!
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