Size Matters in Cartooning"thinking small is the key"

In the beginning, when Arthropods and Dinosaurs roamed the planet, and photoshop was in its early stages, I executed (pun intended) some lousy drawings of what were pretty good ideas.

Not that the drawings were necessarily bad, but they simply didn't translate well when shrunk down to magazine size.
The year was 1999 BC (before computer, or at least before I had one), so Kinkos was the only way to shrink my cartoons and view them at a smaller size.

Fast forward to Photoshop, and looking back at some of my early stuff I can really see how 'muddy' (think tarpits) those drawings were, so I took them into Photoshop and erased tons of background clutter. The results speak for themselves.

OLD VERSION:



NEW VERSION:



As you can see, not only did I omit a bunch of crap (trees, bear, mountain, other details), I also moved things around to acheive a less horizontal composition, since magazines tend to like more square cartoons.

Another important thing was to enlarge the suitcases. In fact, this was critical to the gags success. I even thinned out some of the inner lines on the men for more thin/thick line variation (look closely at the park ranger's hat, face, hands, etc).

Did I have to do this? No, but hey, as long as I'm there...