Not long ago, I finished making a zine of collected art for my latest conventions. The Good Dog Sketchbook and the Black Cat Sketchbook are a collection of various dog and cat related ink drawings I’ve made in the past and the present.
The Black Cat Sketchbook
When I meet up with a cat in real life, I enjoy their presence. But after the meeting, I regret it. I spend the rest of the day with itchy skin from cats rubbing on me, itchy eyes from dander, and a stuffed nose from inhaling fur. Of all the animals I like to be around, this one is the most tragic to me. Lucky for me, I’m not allergic to drawings of cats on paper.
The Good Dog Sketchbook
As any sensible artist who likes drawing animal characters, I like drawing dogs! You can’t go wrong with a good friendly woofer. To this day, I still think I’ve only scratched the surface of dogs to find online! I hope that through the character designs I doodle, someone else will find a dog that’s also to their liking!
The long process
For a while, I was pondering how to more books with less upfront printing cost. I want to try this hoping to make short comics with small runs at conventions to raise money for a larger trade paperback.
Beginning with a zine of cat art, continuing my years long theme of all the cartoon cats I draw. Many I found from digging through old artwork and choosing interesting ink drawings to print in quick 5×8 ashcans copies arranged in Clip Studio Paint with it’s Manga Book Binding Features.
Clip has a great feature to 3D preview my bound book according to the set up margins I free-balled in hopes to create a simple book to print with a home printer.
On the first pass on my home printer, I fiddled with the margins and and page rotations. With the next few passes, I experimented with colored paper to give these books more flair!
Unfortunately, I struggled to get my old Canon printer to make larger prints to take up the paper. And to save on ink, I gave up and went to Minuteman Press, my regular printer to make my copies and be done with it.
Minuteman turned it around within a week and they gave me 100 copies of each! With this, I was able to debut these drawings at CAKE last August to decent reception for my first time there! This is a small experiment to mess with before printing up a large scale art book with real printing and binding!
Even if you miss the conventions I go to, I have Stickers, Art Prints and Comic Books for sale on my Online Store! You can also drop a dollar my way on my Ko-Fi Page!