Somewhere in March, I started working on cartoon support. It seemed like a fun thing to have on a website which dealt primarily with serious commercial art.
The tools for assembling collages could be repurposed for cartoons, but we had to accumulate artwork as well. I found some of my old drawings, cut out the characters, and started out with them.
At the same time, I also began to look for ways to build cartoon story-books, that is, stories that are longer than the four frames of one cartoon strip.
I didn’t want to create a large canvas, because the editor would become unwieldy to work with and it would be hard for a person to nagivate within the image. We would also need to write a lot of code to associate the pages with a book and allow users to flip through them. This seemed like too much trouble, so I just gave up on the project and moved on.
We first worked on art challenges, then on magazines for people who wanted to create a community around something they liked to do with art online.
One day, as we were finishing up the magazine feature, it dawned on us that we already had all the tools we needed to build cartoon stories. All we had to do was remove the spaces between consecutive cartoon strips in a magazine, and it would look like a continuous story.
Yes of course, there was less flexibility in this approach, but hey, it had many other advantages. Check out our first continuous story built out of cartoon strips.
Hope you like it!
Tags: caricatures, cartoon, cartoon magazine, cartoon story, cartoon strip, cartooning, cartoonists, cartoons, drawing cartoons, making cartoons, toonsket
