Ye Olde Towne Pub

I’ve thought about redoing the strip on and off for years.  I always get stopped by something.  Writer’s block, lack of motivation.  Mostly, I sit down to draw something, and I struggle, and I hate the way it comes out, and I quit.  There are a lot of strips that are up on this site that, frankly, I’m embarrassed about.  I don’t want to feel that way again.

Recently, I decided that one of the best ways to dive back into the strip, would be to redesign the characters so that I could draw them more quickly.  I always struggled with the art style in Towne Pub because much of it was cartoony and simple, and much of it I tried to make look complex and comic-booky.  In order to produce a strip on a regular basis, I’d like art that looks good, but isn’t overly complex, and is something I can recreate quickly and easily.

So I decided to redesign the main characters of the strip.  Phinn was the first, and unlike most of the stuff on this site, I decided to generate the artwork 100% digitally and color it myself.  I opened older strips colored by Dave to grab color samples, but otherwise did this in a couple of hours using Adobe PhotoShop and a Wacom tablet.