ISIDTA: Woody Allen The Shrimp

It's Wednesday, and that means it's time for another edition of I'm Sorry, I'll Draw That Again, the cartoon challenge that drives myself and Kit FitzSimons each and every week.

First, view the cartoon here.

This week's is an odd one. I had an idea for something to do this week, but it quickly drew to something that couldn't be done on deadline. So I was stuck, and went out to dinner with a friend of mine. Telling him of my woes, he said "Do a cartoon about a sweet-and-sour shrimp trying to escape a Chinese restaurant." I said, "And what is my punchline supposed to be." He replies, "Improv one up. Okay, make the shrimp think he's Woody Allen if you can't come up with a punchline." No, I have no idea where that combination of ideas came from either, but here it is.

This time I made it black and white on purpose. I had actually planned to lay it out four panels across, but forgot to do that when I scanned it. I think the layout looks better this way anyway, what with the huge title and all. This week's experiment was to draw the strip in Col-Erase blue pencil, and I was really happy with the way it turned out. The blue pencil, as advertised, does not scan at all. Inking was done with the Tachikawa 44 and a Winsor-Newton Brush, and the panel borders were done with a ratty old bamboo pen. Another experiment this week was the lettering, which was done by dragging a low-res copy of the strip into Macromedia FreeHand, drawing the balloons there, and then copy-and-pasting them back into the original Photoshop file. This worked fabulously, and I'm very happy with the results. I used a Photoshop mask to put the balloon "behind" the pirate's hand and crop it at the panel border.

Oh, and I'm stunned at how well Pegleg Pete turned out. Stunned.

The full size version of this strip can be seen here.
Past ISIDTA entries can be found here.
Kit's ISIDTA entries are here.