Episode 551 Scott Adams: Creating a Dilbert Comic While You Watch

Date: 2019-06-01 | Duration: 47:07

Topics

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Content: Scott creates a Sunday Dilbert comic while sharing tips on his process. Discussion includes Scott’s hardware, software and creative techniques

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

[0:01]

watch and I’m gonna teach you the technique I don’t know if I’ll get all the way to the end I’m just gonna do the fun parts this stuff that you might want might wonder about I always get questions about this sort of stuff how do you do it what’s the process so I thought I would show it to you live now there’s one part of the process I can’t show you alive because it’s the only thing you have to do privately which is think of the idea and write it so what I’ve started with and by the way let me let me tell you what my equipment is and I’ll tell you the process so this is a wacom w AC um wait is it om yeah w eh c om Cintiq cin TI q you can google those and find the latest models there are newer models and this there’s one this little bit bigger that I’ll be getting pretty soon now it comes with some controls which you can see over here

[1:02]

controls which you can see over here some controls and you can set those up to be whatever key commands you want so if there are a certain set of repetitive keystrokes you can program them here so I’ve got my copy in my paste and my safe and everything top programmed in so you learn essentially another skill on top of drawing to use this equipment you also learn almost like keyboarding over again because with my left hand on I’m using the controls I’m hitting the you know the control button the shift button etc my cat is gonna do a walk through here so whoa hold on cat in the picture we’re having a cat problem cat tail live stream all right so that’s the equipment I’m using a stylus in which I will draw on the screen if you’re wondering what

[2:02]

on the screen if you’re wondering what this is on my hand it’s a it’s a photographer’s cloth that normally fingers I cut the fingers off and I created a little glove that I use just for drawing because when my hand is on the screen I don’t want the oil of my hand to be on the screen so this is just a little hack that somebody taught me who was using the same equipment alright now I have created a font in my own handwriting specifically my cartoon lettering in writing so I’ve got all of the sentences in a list over here where they appear in the room later meaning you can treat them differently and delete them in their own layer without without affecting the rest of the composition so I start with a file that’s got the boxes already drawn and the next thing I do is I write the joke this was a joke that was suggested somehow I I forget how I got the idea

[3:04]

somehow I I forget how I got the idea but it’s about the character Alice who’s gonna have a bad hair day but because it’s the comic strip world the the bad hair day has gonna be really really bad so I’ve got the lettering in here and by the way this is so creating another text box if you hear that noise in the background I can’t go nuts on her scratching post alright so below the equipment I’ve got my keyboard which you can sort of barely see here and I tuck it underneath the wacom and by the way the wacom can can go up like this to become a standing desk so you can stand up and write down on it or it could be like this in more of an easel situation or spray it up to be just a computer monitor so this is also my general purpose computer it’s just a regular Mac

[4:05]

purpose computer it’s just a regular Mac you could use a Windows machine as well alright so if I wanted to add text I would just select the text tool from the toolbox it doesn’t matter that you can’t see this clearly because I’m explaining it as I go and I just select an area and then I would just say this is a test the text tool and that quickly I can create an another box of text which I can move around and once I’ve turned out my little keyboard thing I can move it around that you put it wherever I want they can also change its size so I could make it gigantic letters and then I can make it I can make it go away because that was just a test so the next thing I do once I have it written is I start boxing in sort of as a first draft who

[5:07]

boxing in sort of as a first draft who are the characters and what positions are they in so this first box is going to be the boss character and he’s going to be on his phone I had a meeting where others are at the meeting and they’re waiting for Alice and they’re wondering why she’s late the answer is going to be she’s having a bad hair day but I can zoom in to the box it’ll be a little difficult to look at you and draw at the same time so talk among yourselves so this this box I’ve got here is a navigation box so where wherever I move things in the little box the the big box moves as well so that’s just a navigation thing over here we’ve got the brush sizes so I can change my brush sizes they’re over here all the tools that I’m going to use the drawing tools and the lines and eraser and then over

[6:08]

and the lines and eraser and then over here or what in Photoshop are called the layers so every time I add a new layer to it it’s treated separately so that later I couldn’t combine layers or get rid of layers and it’s just a convenience for drawing alright so in this first box the bosses could be on his phone and he’s going to be asking something so I want to go to the layer that I called the rough so everything I draw now will be a layer that will go away it’s the first draft layer later I’ll be able to see that layer from a higher layer in other words I’ll be able to see it as if I’m looking through tracing paper to use an old analogy and then I’ll I’ll do the final drawing on the upper layer and when I’m done I’ll delete the bottom layer and just have the clean final drawing so what I’m doing now is the rough the rough layer and I’m thinking okay it’s the boss he’s on the phone he’s at a

[7:09]

the boss he’s on the phone he’s at a meeting so there’s going to be some kind of a table the Dilbert universe is intentionally very simple I don’t leave out scenery and background because I don’t know how to draw it although that’s one advantage because I’m not very good at drawing scenery and background but I would become good at it if it mattered I prefer that the characters are really just the scenery themselves so they usually may have a coffee cup or a or a laptop or something but I don’t give them much stuff because I don’t want your your brain to be looking at the picture and it would slow down your flow of reading the dialogue so as an artistic choice I simplify the pictures to the characters I make the characters stereotypical and ones that you you recognize so that when you see Dilbert or dilbert’s boss or Alice or any of them if you if you follow the strip you know immediately who they are that saves me a lot of time I don’t have

[8:13]

that saves me a lot of time I don’t have to explain who the characters are because you come to it already knowing that and then I leave out the background so you’re not slowed down in your processing of it you go right to the character oh it’s Dilbert I know everything about Dilbert what’s he saying so I want to get right to it because in comedy timing is important so if I slow you down with some detailed scenery you will not get to the timing that I wanted to have all right so I’m gonna have the boss he’s central to this so he’s going to be sitting here and he’s gonna be on his phone so I’m so I’m sort of rough what it would look like for the boss to be on his phone and by the way there’s there are very few things that are is knowing to draw as somebody holding a phone because drawing this part of your arm and what it’s supposed to look like when you’re on the phone is one of those things that you don’t notice as much somebody’s mentioning the iPad pro I have the iPad pro you’re actually you’re

[9:13]

have the iPad pro you’re actually you’re actually watching this periscope from the iPad pro now I know what you’re going to say it’s got a stylus you can draw on it and it’s pretty cool it’s all turtle but it’s also this big right drawing of something this big is going to be an order of magnitude harder than drawing on something this big and when I said I’m probably going to buy I’m going to upgrade to the next bigger one of these it’s so I’m going to add a little bit but that little bit that little bit that the next bigger size adds probably would add something like 25% to my productivity because you know when you’re doing this kind of drawing you’re moving stuff around a lot you’re moving Windows to draw then you got to pick something and move something and find something and you know merge one file with another so there’s a lot of real estate you need and and just getting a little bit more real estate can have a

[10:15]

little bit more real estate can have a gigantic impact on productivity so that’s why the the iPad is a wonderful device but it’s it’s more of a hobbyist toy on the road fun kind of thing whereas if you’re doing serious drawing an art essentially a hundred percent of all artists who do digital art are using the same device so let me say that again pretty much a hundred percent of commercial artists who are doing any kind of real work for pay or using essentially exactly this set up now they may be using other software I use Photoshop but at least that you know they’re using that as well - whatever who is as whatever else are using all right so here’s the boss he’s sitting here he’s on his phone maybe he’s got one hand on the table like he’s not so happy so I’m just roughing out what that would look like and I know he’s talking we’ll all indicate so I don’t forget who’s talking that he’s there then I’m

[11:18]

who’s talking that he’s there then I’m gonna check the rest of the you have to zoom out to look at the rest of the composition because I want to figure out who’s gonna be talking later because I don’t want to create a picture in which it will be hard to depict somebody talking later so now I remind myself who’s talking this will be a cut away to Alice so I’ll just rough that out so I could so I know that’s Alice with her big hair she’s gonna be on the phone - so she’ll have a phone I hate drawing phones I think I’ve mentioned that so I’ve gotta have a lot of phones in this one we’re gonna go back to the boss will give him a different look he’ll be in the middle this time so that’s what the boss is then back to maybe I might even stay on the boss a little bit maybe I’ll go up I’ll give a little different look I’ll give him a more of a close-up maybe now

[12:19]

give him a more of a close-up maybe now probably change that so here’s here’s the backup tool so I’ve got one of my buttons programmed on my programmable device over here that I showed you earlier and so I can back up easily because I didn’t like the composition I’m gonna go back and add in some other characters but I want to make sure I get the the speaking characters right and then I’ll build in the people around them as needed all right so it’s the boss and the boss I know this is gonna be a straight-on view this is gonna be a straight on to you and probably that’s going to be a straight on view I think I will make this an exterior scene you’re probably wondering why do I sometimes draw an exterior of the build they’re in and the answer is that it breaks up the picture so if most of my cartoons are a bunch of people talking to each other at the office and you get

[13:19]

to each other at the office and you get you get blind to people talking you need something to break it up so I I often had a building so I’ll fill that building in later but I give it a little perspective and remind myself what I mean and I can only add the exterior when you can tell from the context that the person speaking is the person I want you to know is speaking so because this is a continuation of a conversation that’s going back and forth the the reader will know this since the the boss is here first hearing Alice talk and then he talks and Alice talks you’re set up to understand that when I go to the exterior you know it’s Alice’s I’m sorry it’s the boss’s turn turning to talk so I can get away with changing changing the picture to an exterior as long as

[14:20]

the picture to an exterior as long as it’s a lot obvious to my audience who would be talking because there’s a little talking balloon that comes off of that all right see I don’t have anybody else talking except in the end and Dilbert is going to be doing a what I call an afterglow line the afterglow this is a term that I brought to cartooning I don’t know if any other cartoonist has ever used this term in cartooning but the afterglow is the panel after the joke so the joke is you know sort of the punchline if you will it’s going to happen before the end and then the end is just going to be one of the characters giving you a little extra all right so it’s the punchline it could have ended there easily that could be the end and most cartoonists would end with a punchline I always take it to the afterglow because you get a little extra a little extra so that’s where that’s going to be so this will be the first

[15:20]

going to be so this will be the first that Dilbert talks and he’s going to be looking in this direction so I just remind myself that there’s gonna be the Dilbert there it’s gonna be about that big he’s gonna be in there roughly that position you don’t need to see what I’m drawing I’m just roughing out of Dilbert well actually I’ll blow it up see if see if you can come close so you can see that you know I didn’t necessarily need to give him any years or anything I’m really just getting the size so I want to know what position is in blah blah blah now remember everything I’m drawing now it’s going to be in the rough draft layer that gets deleted later so I actually would have you know I’m just showing you the process here I wouldn’t have completed the first positioning sketch even to that level of detail normally it would be less so I didn’t like where he is I’m moving him down a little bit I’ll probably adjust all that several times and I’ve got Alice saying

[16:20]

several times and I’ve got Alice saying something over here she’s gonna be here in Alice will be I gotta go back now one of the things you have to learn is you’re when you’re doing text you’re on different layers and when you’re drawing and every time you cut and paste you add a new layer and you can easily you could easily get confused what layer you’re on so you continuously have to ask yourself before applying a tool am I on the right layer which it takes a long time to learn so it takes a long time to automatically pick a tool and then before you use it say am I on the right layer and and I still you’ll see me be on the wrong layer even during this demonstration a bunch of times all right so now I can see that the boss was wounded that in the middle he’s he’s going to be below the table here and here we’re gonna have Dilbert looking to

[17:24]

here we’re gonna have Dilbert looking to the side again here we’re gonna have the boss looking now we’re not going to have the Boston that this is the in this panel something dramatic is going to happen the Alice’s hair is going to turn into a big fist and it’s going to punch the boss because that’s what a really bad hair day looks like so I’ll just block that out so I can remember it and that’ll have folks sitting at the table and then we’ll have the boss recognize that Alice has entered the room he’ll just be looking in this direction and that’ll have Alice at first she’s standing and she’ll be looking at him and she’ll have an angry look on her face and with bad hair she’ll be reaching over and grabbing the grabbing of the chair because I’m

[18:24]

grabbing of the chair because I’m indicating that she’s just walked in and she’s gonna grab that chair now now that I know where everybody is I can go back and sort of plop them in as just placeholders so I know that there’s an empty chair there and there and I know we’ve got Alice alright so now I’ve done the first draft I’m gonna click on that layer that has all the drawing I’ve done so far which are just placeholders and I’m gonna lower the opacity gonna make it less opaque meaning that it probably disappeared on your screen now I can see what I wrote but it’s too light for you to see and the reason I’ve lightened it is because I’m gonna be adding things on top of it and I’m just using it as sort of a guide to where to put things so the first thing I might add would be some lines to indicate the table so I picked the line tool and I just approximately followed the line I had before and just pick two points and drag

[19:24]

before and just pick two points and drag it and you’ve got a table doesn’t take long except I missed I missed my connection there so delete that zoom in so I don’t make the same mistake again and there’s table then I’m gonna I’m going to be creating dialogue boxes before I show you this let me say that I am completely aware that what I’m gonna do next is an inefficient process and then if I spend some amount of time I could make this a lot better process but I choose not to do that because there’s something about what I’m doing now as inefficient as it is there’s some how I enjoy and gives me a mental break from the process of creating to do something mindless for a moment and here’s what I’m doing so I used the line tool to put the outlines of something like a balloon a speaking

[20:27]

of something like a balloon a speaking balloon a speech balloon to the boss now I just combine those layers so that the lactis ones although all the lines around this act is one but I don’t have quarters if I try to draw those corners in by hand it’s gonna make me crazy so what I do is I have a file as nothing but balloon corners it’s got a sample balloon yeah I know if I were using not Photoshop I could use different software and I could just grab that balloon and reshape it but again I’m conscious of the fact I’m doing inefficiently for a reason it’s part of sort of an overall creative process of thinking and acting and resting so the resting is part of the is part of the process too so I copied a corner from my file I’m gonna drag it over there and just discovered that I used the wrong size line so I’m not gonna apply that

[21:30]

size line so I’m not gonna apply that I’m going to get rid of that layer so what I mean is that the lines I put around the box I thought were a number nine but I accidentally had inset not a seven so those lines weren’t the same thickness as the corners I was going to connect and so I got to go back and find hmm now one of the things that Photoshop does this maddening is it hides things damn it so it hides and I can’t tell you how long I’ve spent looking for this as long as I’ve used Photoshop which is 25 years every now and then there’s a prompt that disappears and sometimes it’s just gone and I can spend an hour looking for the

[22:34]

and I can spend an hour looking for the box to put in the brush size is there we are all right no no no that wasn’t it is that there it is so I had to have the line tool selected and that made the problem show up after I made sure I didn’t have it covered and now I’ve got size width 9 I’m gonna put back the balloon size I’m holding a button to tell it to draw it straight as opposed to diagonal and then I’m going to combine those layers and that becomes all part of the background layer and then I should also say that anybody who’s really good at Photoshop is probably Jesus is probably gagging right now because I’m not doing things in

[23:35]

now because I’m not doing things in necessarily the most obvious or efficient ways I’m aware of that and I would change it if it mattered all right so I’ve just added a corner to that balloon I won’t make you watch while I do the rest you can see that that’s how the balloons get made I’ll just add the other four corners later here’s the part I wanted to show you is because somebody asked yesterday the next phase I have a bunch of templates for the characters heads so here I’ve opened up let me make it bigger so you can see this is a bunch of templates for the boss’s head so they don’t have expressions they just have the the basic head shape that’s because if you draw the same basic head shapes over and over again it makes you crazy and it’s actually one of the hardest things to draw so drawing Dilbert’s head

[24:38]

things to draw so drawing Dilbert’s head or wall-e or the boss their heads are all interesting non-standard shapes so it just saves me a bunch of time if I start with a template now the template that I put in is not the final art that too is just the next level of draft so I look at my positions and I say to myself well that looks like a boss who is roughly in this position and so I copy that and put it in and then I make it the right size so I got to shrink it and then I gotta twist it and then you stick it on there like that and then I hexa dented up this so I have to delete a little bit so I’m not writing over the line I just put there these and make sure I don’t put with my final layer I move them up to my draft layers lips because that’s where they belong alright now since most of the rest of the process is just more of this until we

[25:39]

process is just more of this until we get to the coloring phase the coloring phase I would just change this art into a bitmap first to get rid of all the edges change it back to to greyscale and then change it again from greyscale to CMYK none of this means anything to you unless you know how to use Photoshop and then I could just use the bucket tool to point and click and fill in the the layer it’s fill in the colors so the coloring is easy you don’t need to see so I’ve got a boss here with a little examples thing going on here let me see here’s a layer problem I forgot to combine layers and so I was on the wrong layer and that I have to back up from that because I still had this layer in I could actually make all the layer solid for a while

[26:46]

there’s a reason all right so now everything here is a draft now here’s the hard part I have to figure out how to get the blossom honestly phoned and the problem is that a cell phone is small it’s mostly hidden by your hand so know if you can see this process let’s say maybe I’ll make it a little bit bigger so I probably wouldn’t normally draw at this scale all right so this is I might draw a little bit smaller than this normally and then it gets shrunk down when it’s printed so here’s the hardest thing I draw oh and to make this look like a phone from the back you could just give it a little I’m a phone camera button indication there now how do you draw an arm it’s sort of coming toward you but coming off the person

[27:46]

toward you but coming off the person does that look like it now you get to see that even a professional cartoonist does a lot of trial and error so for me drawing is a lot of well does it look like that doesn’t look like that if you were looking at it from that angle what it would look like that what would it look like so you have to actually this process is a process of actually pulling yourself you know and of your environment and for a moment imagining yourself in this imaginary world where you’re looking at a character who’s on the phone and then you’re trying to see it first and once you see it you try to translate that onto the page and say okay this is what I’m seeing I’m seeing I’m looking right at his elbow so I can’t tell that the elbow is connected so it’s going to be sort of like that then there’s a chair behind him and then I just fill in some of the details I always have them wearing their IDs now

[28:47]

always have them wearing their IDs now this part of the boss was a just a placeholder you can still see it right this is where the boss’s body is I don’t like that line make him a little chubbier and we’ve got his hand out here that’s his sleeve and now we’ll give him hands he’s got chubby little fingers all right well back whoops hello then we’ll get back in there get back in there so so you have to there’s a lot of zooming in and zooming out so when you zoom out you could get a better picture of whether you got the perspective right and in this case I did not so there’s something weird about that line so I’m going to get rid of it from the angle that you’re looking at it it’s not as obvious that I needed to do that but trust me if you’re looking at it

[29:47]

trust me if you’re looking at it straight on it didn’t make sense all right now most of the art of cartooning is about expressions if you get the expressions right you know the eyes and the mouth yeah you’re 80% of a cartoonist so here the boss is a little angry at Alice and getting rid of some stray lines here and so I’d like to give him the angry eyes where where they’re just straight lines with little dots so the actual eye is he’s so angry his eyes are small and as his mouth is a little bit turned down like that to indicate these sort of unhappy while he’s talking so that’s what one character would look like when I’m done with drawing this character I will go I will lighten it again make it a lower level layer I’ll take my final layer and I’ll go in

[30:48]

take my final layer and I’ll go in Tights wasn’t what I had in mind I’ll go in about this tightness and then this would be the final layer now I usually wait till I have all of these the first rough in but I’ll just give me the idea all right so if this were my final layer the brush would be too small for this I’m gonna bump it up to 10 size 10 now drawing a smooth oval is actually one of the hardest things you can do so drawing any of the characters noses or heads are kind of kind of challenging so if you’d like a good dose of inspiration watch how hard it is for me to do the simplest task that I do for my job and watch how many times I’ll have to do it before I’m happy with it

[31:49]

happy with it now imagine that I’ve been doing this for 30 years so if you try to draw a character and you say yeah I’ve tried this 10 times and haven’t gotten to write I’ve been doing this 30 years the same stupid drawings and it still takes me 10 times to make sure that I like the line now some lines are easy and some are hard I’ll show you think or hard ones in a moment noses are hard but I kind of nailed it on the first try alright so I may have exaggerated so you can get away with some imperfection in the in the zoomed in version because when people see it it’s going to be much smaller and any imperfection in that nose would be unnoticed as long as you’ve got the major in line in looking right alright so I knew on that so I told you there are some lines that are hard and some that are easy this line below is an easy because I don’t need to lift my hand and

[32:49]

because I don’t need to lift my hand and it’s not an ark so well I’m going to lift my hand but alright I told you it was easy and then I messed it up because I had a or in fact there are I so typically the easy lines and especially the ones that don’t have to be exact like the bosses hair pretty much I will draw that correctly on the first try this line of his head is a tough one I got that close enough these lines are easy very easy the boss’s hair is easy his mouth is easy this line is easy so the rest is easy so the hardest two lines were the slope of his head and the the circle that forms his Nehru’s now if I were to complete this I would just continue on

[33:50]

complete this I would just continue on and put them all together let me show you how I make these exterior buildings you’ve seen the exterior of Dilbert’s building probably so many times and you say to yourself oh you just cut and paste it but I don’t and there’s a reason I literally draw every one of these exterior buildings from scratch even though they look the same and the reason is they don’t look the same so your eye will not get as used to the Dilbert comic over time if I allow the the art and the look to drift so the early the early way the characters look is very different than the way they look now and that’s not unusual in comics they will start with a certain look and they’ll sort of evolve over time if I cut and paste the evolving stops so even though I’m starting with templates to just make it easier to do this I still do the final layer by hand does that allows it to drift and it’s the drift

[34:51]

allows it to drift and it’s the drift that makes it art if I did cut and paste it you your brain would to detect that effort so it’s the imperfections that make it interesting which is hard to learn all right so here’s what I’m drawing this building whoops at the wrong tool I want to use the line tool and I just start a beginning and an end point yeah I’ll see I don’t know if you’ll be able to see this too clearly but I first start with the outline of the building I give it a little bit of dimensionality there so it looks like you’re on the ground looking up a little bit and then over time I’ve figured out a design that has some detail on it but it’s still easy to draw and you’ll see that I’m first putting a sort of a general shape to it and then I’ll put in a few windows I don’t put individual windows because

[35:55]

I don’t put individual windows because office buildings don’t often have those but now each of these has to be exactly the right start and finish to be compatible with the fact that you’re looking up so I’m not trying to be parallel I’m trying to distort the perspective the same way that you would see it if you were from the ground now if you were to try to draw this as quickly as I am on the first try you would be very frustrated because this is very hard to do it takes a long time to learn to do it this quickly now I’m going to draw a second line just to give some shape and dimensionality to it so this would suggest that when you’re looking up you’re seeing some edges from this direction and maybe some shadow or some edges that you would not see from another angle so this just gives it just

[36:58]

another angle so this just gives it just a little bit of an accent so it doesn’t look flat so again I don’t want to add too much detail because I don’t want to fatigue the person yeah and I don’t want to ruin the timing of the dialogue I want to get to a fast but give it a little bit of texture a little bit of of life all right so you’re the other seat and I’m gonna wait on those so and then I saved my work periodically I think you can see the whole process now somebody says that I ever take drafting no but interestingly enough it that’s that’s the oddest question because the history is so interesting so the question was have I ever taken a drafting class as somebody thought my my strokes were controlled I guess my grandfather who I am named

[38:00]

guess my grandfather who I am named after my middle name anyway he’s named after him apparently was exactly like me and meaning my personality so my mother says that my grandfather was just like me now I never met him because he died the year that I was born well he was a draftsman so my grandfather who I’m told I’m just like who I never met so he didn’t ever influence me in person was a draftsman now is it a coincidence that that someone who was a draftsman has someone later in the family he was also an artist well turns out my mother was a landscape artist you can see one of her works on the wall there so my mother is deceased but she did lots of commercial landscapes in her small town and sold sold basically every painting she’d need so I have on one side I’ve got the

[39:01]

so I have on one side I’ve got the drafting skill on the other side I’ve got another kind of artist so the odds that I’d have some artistic talent were pretty high and my sister also an artist and so it’s no surprise all right with say how long you’ve been digital I think choose that was in for I don’t know long time so maybe 10 or 15 years 12 years something like that any other questions so we’ll upload this on periscope somebody’s saying do I do one per day I do one per day on average but I batch up my work so I might have a day where I’m writing a day when I’m drawing that sort of thing is it’s easier to write in certain parts of the

[40:02]

easier to write in certain parts of the day and it’s easier to draw in other parts of the day so it’s easier to write in the morning when my brain is fresh but I’m drinking coffee and you know I’m kind of hyper in the morning it’s not good for drawing cuz you want your hand to be calm and you’re you know your body and become to get the most you know clean lines so I prefer drawing either before I’ve had my coffee or at least much of it or in the afternoon after exercises ideal the very the very best time for me to draw is an hour to after I’ve exercised when my body is relaxed was it hard to go from paper to computer it was challenging I’m not sure hard is exactly the right word I had enough incentive to do it that I put in the time one needs because you know it’s my job if it were my hobby I don’t know

[41:04]

job if it were my hobby I don’t know maybe it’d be a little too hard and I would have said ask act with this but because it’s my job I of course dove in and put in the amount of work that one does for a job and that was very manageable but let me explain it a little bit drawing is sort of a zen-like process where you’re just like do you and the paper and the pen or the pencil and you can really kind of get into a mindset when you that can be very enjoyable people who were artists probably know what I’m talking about but when you’re drawing in the computer it’s sort of a hybrid between what I just described you know the fun of putting the lines on paper and typing and coding because you’re you haven’t your brain has to keep going back and forth between the the tools that you’re using you know push this button slide this hold this while you’re moving this you know copy what layer I’m

[42:06]

moving this you know copy what layer I’m on so the amount of mental processing to use the welcome is probably I know 10 to 20 times more mental requirement than just drawing on a piece of paper and the only thing you have to get wrong is like well I guess left or you erase that but what you get in return is a way better art you have more options you can do things that would just be too hard manually you can add shading and tone and texture or usually and but more importantly it probably reduced my workload by I don’t well over half so the time it takes me to make a comic with the technology it’s got to be at least a hard 2% faster and if if time matters to you then that’s the preferred thing so if all you want to do is enjoy

[43:07]

thing so if all you want to do is enjoy the the feeling of being an artist well maybe a canvas and the piece of paper are just what you need nothing wrong with that but if you’re a professional and your time matters and you want and you’re being paid for creation you want to hit free up as much time use your hand as little as possible you know conserve your resources then the technology is the only way to go it’s called a Wacom Cintiq yes a Wacom w AC om and uses a stylus to draw when will this comic could be published July twenty eighth twenty how has current business environment to change your approach and jokes well of course like everything else in the world I have to watch out for you know the the new the new red lines about what you can and cannot say in the exact words you need and even though my job

[44:09]

words you need and even though my job and mocking things that are yeah maybe not as useful as whoever invented the thought they would be even I don’t necessarily annoy my audience so you know one of the hardest things to do as an as a creator is to understand that you’re creating a product and you have customers and you’re working for them so if you’re working for the audience it doesn’t make sense for you to also annoy them with your own you know weird thoughts and things that that they’re not going to appreciate I save the weird thoughts for periscope [Music] no Dale is not my middle name do you defend your copyright yes in all the normal ways now it turns out that defending my copyright you know it’s

[45:11]

defending my copyright you know it’s part of the job of the publishers and the syndication company so you know they’re they’re people in place to do that and it’s not really what when somebody says do I defend my copyright I don’t defend it against audience people the public sharing it with their friends all right so technically it would be illegal technically it would be legal for you to say hey here’s my favorite Dilbert and put it on social media technically technically illegal you’re never going to have a problem with that if you put two of them up then you’re a publisher now you wouldn’t get in trouble for - and you wouldn’t get in trouble if several times during the year or even several times during the month you said oh I really like this comic I want to share it on social media I’m okay with that it’s technically illegal I’m okay with it I like that you like it that’s as far as

[46:12]

I like that you like it that’s as far as it goes you know I it’s not about the extra attention it’s not about somebody’s using it without my permission it’s just I like that you like it all right that’s these are not big deals but if you started a if you started your own Twitter account to publish my comic every day or you tried to monetize it by publishing it every day then you’re a publisher and then my publisher goes after you because they say we have a contract with this cartoonist and we are the only publishing the Raptors and the Warriors are playing well I’ll have to go watch that I think that’s all for now I’m gonna stop here thanks for watching this and I’ll talk to you later oh go to Dilbert calm if you want to see Dilbert I guess I should throw that in there