We’re home safe and sound from our trip, completely exhausted and, sadly, stuck at home due to our car being out of commission. (Pretty certain it’s the clutch at this point, but I can’t afford to get it towed somewhere just for the diagnostic, let along to have it fixed, so I’m just going to have to suck it up and walk until we have the money to repair it.) Thankfully, Eric not only gave us a ride home from the airport, but to the store, so we were able to stock up on food for the next few weeks, so hopefully we should be okay. *fingers crossed*
Now, it should come as no surprise to many of you that it is, in fact, 2008 now. I know some of you are probably shocked to hear of this development, so let it sink in for a moment, then feel free to continue. Anyhow, it’s a new year, and I feel compelled this year to actually try and commit to a new year’s resolution. It’s something that someone e-mailed me a few weeks back, and I got to thinking that now that I’m actually doing this full-time, I may as well try and make it official.
My new year’s resolution is that, from now on, characters are going to use their damned HANDS.
There are certainly exceptions to this – sometimes, when a person is just standing around, hands tend to gravitate towards pockets. It happens. But look at today’s comic as an example – before, I probably would have just had Greg standing there, looking into the engine compartment, hands in his pockets. I would have rewritten the dialogue to account for the fact that he was not pointing, and the joke might have been lost altogether.
The reason for this resolution is twofold – one, I just flat out need to get better at drawing convincing hands. They’ve been my Achilles heel for 8 years, and I need to get over that. Forcing myself to do it is the only way for me to get over my shortcoming. Second, the more I draw hands, the bigger pool of them I have available to draw from, so even in the future, if I wasn’t drawing NEW artwork every day, the library from which to draw would become fairly vast. That means no more missed comics, even if I have a rough day for whatever reason. Not too shabby.
Anyhow, that’s my resolution. Hopefully it won’t be like MOST New Year’s resolutions, and go on to be broken within a week, but I’m going to keep at it as best I can. And remember – there’s nothing wrong with hands being in pockets – so long as it makes SENSE for them to be in pockets. S’all I’m saying. :)
