Free Advise Given For Free -or- How Do You Measure Progress

No drugs behind this doodle....not sure how
it all started but it is weird.  Boon cartoons,
Boondawgoggle, cartoonist for hire.

Wow!  Tomorrow is the last day of January.  Only 92% of the year left.  So let's take inventory.  If the rest of the year continues as this month has unfolded what will things look like in December?  Ah? No, I'm not going to go through that exercise.  It's too damn depressing.  And besides, one month does not a trend make.  Now I just want to cry.  The only aspect of January I can  think of that I hope projects  the balance of the year is that I'm alive.  How's that for positive thinking.

Surely I've done something this month that warrants it as not being a complete waste of 8% of the time I have available this year.   I'm kind of feeling a bit like what a farmer must feel like.  He plows the field, sows the seed and waits,and waits and waits for several months to see if what he had done provides the expected results, but it is not until he waits for months will he knows if he did enough.  By the time he knows it is too late to adjust and correct.  I really need to find a way to get more instant feed back.  I need some Star Wars future vision telescope to see into the future.

Here's what I do know about this month....I've given a lot of advice for free.  Of course this is the normal thing I do because the advise is given in hopes that it will lead to future sales based on my advise and it is for these sales I get paid.   I wish it wasn't that way, I wish I could just say, "I get paid to do the advise thing".  The reason it is frustrating to me is people ask for the advise,

Do you get the artist humor?  Comment if you understand it
or want to know what it is.  Check out the frustrated pose,
completely how I feel this month.  Cartoonist for hire, Boon,
boondawgoggle doodles.

insight and opinion, only to discount the information entirely or go off and implement it on their own.  I had a lawyer friend tell me once that he gives people a bill at the end of meeting with him, and he has actually had people say, "what's this for, you didn't do anything?", to which he responds...you came in with questions, and you are leaving with answers, and this is why you are paying me.  See I live in a world where I have very intangible assets...TIME, INFORMATION and HONESTY.

Here's looking at that glass more full...I've got 225 days to make this a fabulious year.  YEAH!!!

Valentine's Day - Some Card and Gift Ideas

The message of love in pictures.   This classic, cute,
funny cartoon Valentine's day message

Gift, Apparel and Cards with this image:

Gifts and Cards at Cafepress.com\OneGuyDrawing

Gifts and Apparel, image without the red background at CafePress.com\OneGuyDrawing

Valentine's Day Cards - GreetingcardUniverse.com\OneGuyDrawing

You've got to love this
guy's expression. Dirty
minds on valentine's and
birthday

Very Popular Card for Guys who's Birthday is on Valentines:

Sexy, Kinky, Funny, Dirty Valentine's Day Card - GreetingCardUniverse.com\OneGuyDrawing

You've Just got to heart (love)
this play on words

I've Got A Heart On for You - Play on Words just makes me smile

Valentine's Day Card for Her - GreetingCardUniverse.com\OneGuyDrawing

Gifts and Apparel - Valentine for Wife at CafePress.com\OneGuyDrawing

Gift and Apparel Valentine for Girlfriend at CafePress.com\OneGuyDrawing

 Asked that special someone to join you in a drink to celebrate Valentine's Day with this card.

Valentine's Day Card - sexy, kinky, love at GreetingCardUniverse.com\OneGuyDrawing

After Kids Valentine's Day  is not the same.

New Baby in the House Card at GreetingCardUniverse/OneGuyDrawing

Calling all Nerd, Geeks, and Computer Programers, say it in binary code.

Valentine's Day Card for nerd, geek, computer at GreetingCardUniverse/OneGuyDrawing

Variety of Gifts and Apparel at CafePress.com/OneGuyDrawing

The Odds - Most People Think They Don't Apply to Them. The Odds Are You're An Idiot.

Boon Cartoon, boondawgoggle. Doodles. Spy,
happy face,  naked legs, gun, thug, jail, girl
things and hearts.

The odds?  We hear this term tossed about regarding casino's and the the odds are in their favor.  Sports games will  have odds of one team winning.  It also applies to endeavors of life and just about any activity or event where the outcome could be more than one result.  There are no odds that 2 plus 2 is 5.  Just never going to happen.  But the odds of a random coin flip landing on heads is 50%.

Now most people don't understand or at least they are not comfortable with statistics, which is the basis for odds.  What I've witnessed is people generally dramatically skew the odds or interpret them to favor their preferred outcome by employing emotion and desire.

What has me thinking about this?  Well for one I saw a news story this morning.  Now I've seen a lot of news stories that employ this tactic of big numbers standing alone.  This particular story focused on trailers coming unhitched from cars while moving.  They quoted that 300 people have died  from 2008 - 2012 from unhitched trailers.  Pretty big number.  Me being a bit analytical quickly did the math in my head.  That's 60 people per year, figure on average 2 per car that is 30 car incidence a year, or about 2.5 per month.  I agree if one of these people were a family member I'd be devastated and outraged that a simple solution could of prevented it...but is .00002 percent of the population of the United States being impacted by such an event cause to call it a crisis?  Is it even note worthy enough to justify allocation of the time on a news show?  The odds are slim to none and slim is out of town that this will ever impact someone you know.  But here is the emotional side....people respond to big numbers...300 is a big number to most, but not so when put into perspective.

Here's a big number...in the next 90 years 300,000,000 people in the United States will die.  The current population of the US will all be dead in 90 years.  If you are part of the population that includes you.  The odds are 100% for you and anyone you know.  So here's a question, knowing this, why wouldn't everyone buy as much life insurance as they could.  Yea it might not enrich themselves but it will your family, who in turn could buy more gobs of life insurance to pass down more gobs of money.  The net return on money spent on a life insurance policy is huge.  It would only take a couple of generations of people dying in the family to make everyone in American very much millionaires.  You can't fight the odds of dying.

People want to fight the odds all the time.  No matter how much people understand about the historical numbers, if the unlikelihood of the event being in their favor they ignore it.  The lottery.  Look at pee-wee football, if you have a son who has ever played football from ages 5 to 12 you've seen the parent that seems hell bent that their son will be in the NFL.  Even if the kid does eventually play varsity high school football his odds of being drafted to the NFL are ,08 percent.  I'm not certain of  the odds of a pee wee player, but in my neck of the woods and all the kids I've coached,  I'd reduce that significantly.  Are those odds you should really fight?  You've got a 99.995 percent chance of failure.   Kind of seems if its going to happen its going to happen.

Yea beating the odds feels great and usually results in great things; money, fame, notoriety, and such.  But if you are going to completely ignore the odds you better be prepared to fail and understand the failure is not your fault.

Do you try to beat the odds?  Do the relative facts matter to you? Do you just focus on the number?

Baby Boom Last Year Sucks

Real quick light handed sketches caught
using  the Wacom Inkling.  I wanted to use
them to ink over with dip pen.
Boon Cartoons Boondawgoggle

 I've written about being born in the last year of the baby boom before.  By all accounts, I'd thought,  the baby boom normally is quoted as covering the years 1945 to 1963.  Which would put me as being born in the last year, and yes I turned 50 in December.

Well this morning, as is typical,  I was watching the Today Show and they did a segment on turning 50.  They touted 1964 as being the last year.  If you go look it up there really doesn't seem to be an exact consensus of the dates.  I really thought I was dead on.  Evidently not.

So there ya have it.  Another thing I thought I held significant distinction, being born in the last month of the last year of the boom all blown to hell.

Scanned image of sketch pad.  Here I inked
in the Inkling sketches with a dip pen.
Boon Cartoons Boondawgoggle.

I wonder if we are going to see a gazillion specials and shows on this event, the last boomers turning 50.  What does it all mean?  I hope if they do they point out that for the most part the tail end of the boomer bubble sucks.  As I've said before my entire life has felt as if I'm on the back side of wave, on a surfboard, paddling like hell to catch the wave.  I only feel that the wave will come crashing into the beach before I ever benefit from the front end boomer's push.

We suffered worst in the stock market crashes, since we really weren't invested heavily in the long up swing from 1995 to 2000. We've suffered the most by coming out of college when most businesses were squeezing out all middle management, from the LBO craze, leaving us nowhere to be promoted, since all the older boomers were stuck not moving through the middle management ranks.  We suffered  the worse in the housing market, since a lot of us were just moving up from our starter homes to homes for our families in the mid-2000's.  We are going to suffer the most from the eventual need to increase taxes to meet the social welfare needs of the front end boomers.  We really have been sucking the tail pipe of this fantastic generational anomaly.

Wacom Inkling - Will Layers Work To Create Finished Quality Work?

I'm still playing around with the Wacom Inkling I got for Christmas.  I got to thinking about how could I best use the LAYER function and did this test.  I thought about it from the aspect of what, in my experience, is the normal order of events to get to a finished cartoon.  Of course after an idea has materialized and really, really rough sketches have been worked up, the order I do things is this:

1. rough out in pencil (normal or blue) the border
2. rough the characters and dialog balloons in pencil  (again blue or normal)
3. ink in the characters
4. do background and shading
5. ink in the dialog and balloons
6. ink the borders
7. sign
8. erase the pencil if I used a normal lead

So with that in mind I decided I'd do a test.  I'd push the LAYER button on the receiver at each step and see if it could create what would be acceptable to me as a finished product with no erasing. (Just a bit of complaint for BLOGGER!, it is not real easy to create and lay out images in a manner that could be more creative), Sorry if this looks a bit cluttered.

rough, what would of been
done in pencil very lightly

Inked layer, You can't tell much
difference between the rough

Dialog and balloon layer

Border and background

shading and signature

Finished? Combining layers
2 thru 5.

My initial thoughts on this process is it would be nice to have different color inks in the pen, like one of those  4 color pens you had in school.  It is hard to tell the difference on the paper what was a rough pen line and finished pen line even though I tried to do the rough really lightly.   You can see I forgot to ink in the month.  I also noticed, and it is more obvious when you look at the scanned version, that the finished inking is really no where near the smoothness and quality I'd submit my finished work  It is disjointed and clumsy looking.  Finally, you can see that the elements don't line up real well.  The cross hatching is on the balloon and such.  I don't understand why the images are so dark here.  They load to Photoshop white.  I'm not sure at this stage if each layer would load as layers of one image file into Photoshop, but if they did, and you like to ink in PS, then this could all function as your roughs.  I don't see it as, of yet,  a way to create a finished work.

This is the sketch pad version.  If  it  had
been intended for a finished piece I'd
been able to erase the roughed layer, so
this doesn't look as clean as it would be.

If you are wondering why the sketch pad, scanned version has more characters, it is because I drew them earlier in the day.  I didn't want to use another piece of paper just to do my test and I understand the Inkling on records what you draw at the time.

2014 Time to Make Something Happen

Messing around with my Wacom Inkling so very random
doodles fired off in quick order.  This is the scanned
original  page not the saved Inkling images.

Happy New Year.  There I officially acknowledged the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

Resolutions typically occur at this junction of the old year and the new year.  I understand why but it could also be looked at as relatively random because for most people the biggest difference between the last week of December and the first week of January is they have to throw out the old calendar and put up a new one, and start remembering the new year to write on checks (who the hell writes checks anymore?).

For me there has always been a definitive line of demarcation between years.  It has to do with the fact that in my regular working career everything I did last year gets closed out and I start the new year at ZERO. Imagine your favorite football team going into the locker room at half time up by a good margin, say 35 points.  They worked hard to establish that margin in the first half, but now when they take the field after halftime, the score gets reset to 0-0.  Everything they did doesn't matter any longer.  It now becomes, what have you done now?  So I start ever year at ZERO, and I have to figure out how to start building the score back up.  Literally, because nothing I did last year, or the years before will contribute to what I need this year.

Wacom Inkling test of the layering option.  This is the
scanned original image.  The Inkling images, for example
show  the lower right doodle as  6 layers. 

I recognize what I need to do is figure out a way to annuitize my life.  It has been said I have a great job, but not a career.  I stop working, its over, period.  So my resolution this year is to figure out how to annuitize my life.  Develop something that will be a perpetual motion, money maker.  Do it once, point it in the right direction and let it take off.  Or at least something that each year builds on the previous.  I'm tired of trying to reach the top of a mountain using a Stair Master.

What exactly this will all look like, I don't know.  I do know that it all has to be broken down into sequential steps that can be taken on daily.  I'm not convinced the objective here should be to create a particular goal  I've done that for years past, and it never has worked out.  I realized this a couple of years ago when I decided to just stop putting together a business plan.  I still review the past year and assess what worked and didn't, but I've stopped putting some definitive objective/goal down as a target.  I'm just will break it down into daily steps.  So my next "step" is to figure out what the "steps" should be.

***Sketch Pad, Wacom Inkling test update ****

This image to the right is a scanned image of a sketch pad page.  I had my Inkling receiver plugged into my computer when I had Photo Shop opened, and I noticed that when I moved the Inkling pen around it was moving the cursor, so I created a new PS canvas and tried to draw.  Well low and behold it draws on the PS canvas, kind of like any number of tablets, but with this the image is also on the paper.  The one thing I've not figured out yet is how to match up the image and the Inkling's zone of reception. You can see here I've created corners that corresponded to the edges of the PS canvas.   Obviously much smaller, even though I set the PS canvas to 8.5x11 inch.  It seemed to also expand when I zoomed in or out.   More on this later, be sure to check back.

  The idea of cartooning as a profession had been a very strong desire of mine starting way back in fourth grade, about 1971.  I was an addicted doodler, follower and copier of comics in the paper and some more cartoony comic books, like PLOP!.  I would spend hours researching and reading everything I could find about cartooning.  While in high school I must of read every back issue of Writers Digest, a magazine available in my school library, that had an article about cartooning in the back of every issue. I drew regularly, was on the school paper staff as cartoonist, almost every project I did in four years of art classes had a cartoon feel and I even tried a submission to the syndicates.  This all waned as college loomed on the horizon.  I was never encouraged by my parents to purse the cartooning further.  Now in their defense they may not of realized my dream.  Not sure how they could of missed it, but I really don't remember them ever asking or suggesting graphic art or other art pursuits.  So off to college I went.  I'm not in possession of my freshman year notebooks so I'm not sure if I continued to doodle while studying, but I'm certain I didn't spend my free time drawing.  There was drinking and fun to be had.  So between attending classes, attempting to study and my three hours daily in the weight room (a story for another day), cartooning took a back seat.  

Life got complicated for the next 10 years.  In and out of college, working, building a career as a fledgling final stage Baby Boomer, I don't recall ever really thinking about cartooning much.  Then 

a couple of times in the 1990's, once in 1994 and once in 1997, I got the itch to pursue cartooning full time.