More Inktober and back to where Alvin Began

 As I had the idea for the second Inktober drawing I quickly thought it was a perfect topic for an Alvin cartoon, aka Meet the People.

The trouble was, recently I’d changed to first loading my hand drawn sketches into CorelDraw. Where I converted my rough ink work into smooth line work using the Corel autotrace function, and then I coloured the characters with the many great tools in CorelDraw. It took away a lot of drudgery and my work a had very unique look. Unfortunately, when my computer crashed some months ago the only version of CorelDraw also died/ I've not reloaded it onto any new computer yet. So what to do?

So I decided to go back to where it all began. Originally Alvin was devised to created using a number of cut out shapes. I had quickly sketch a few versions of him and his wife Lila. then rearrange them to create something like a cartoon I wished. I could play with the composition and exaggerate their body language. It was fun. I would then normally trace over, scan and/or redraw a final cartoon, it was simple and relatively quick. Here’s a little more detail from an old blog post.

In the interest of keeping it simple I did draw up the basic cartoon on scrap paper using a tombow pen, but then I cut out the shapes. I typed in his comments about a real relic from the past called a cassette printed that in a large font and drew a speech bubble around it. Cut it out as well and I had a decent early version of an Alvin cartoon. If you follow me on Instagram you’ll notice that so far this year I’m including the tools are used to create the drawing along with the drawing taken with my phone, rather than a scan of the drawing itself. I’m testing out my theory that I get more views when I have my hand in a picture, or showing how I created the image. Not just posting the finished image.