I am having lessons with two professional Italian cartoonists on how to use photoshop. Here is my first complete exercise. I am ever so proud. I have also created my own handrwriting font at http://www.yourfonts.com which was also pretty exciting. Next time I might use a ruler.

life before numbers

I am a fan of the web cartoon xkcd, described as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”,  for the stick-men that don’t even have faces, and for the humour which often manages to be gnomic and highly accessible at the same time.

well

I had to include this second cartoon because it’s about electrical engineers. (Although Marco would argue that he’s an electronic not an electrical engineer.

urgent mission

It’s a website  promoting “positive psychology” that really annoys me and which inspired this cartoon. NB: the names of the tests, surveys and inventories are REAL.

[For answers to any questions you may have about this post, like "Did you actually do those tests?" please read this post at my other blog]

membership refused

The Order of the Stick

I love “The Order of the Stick” for the deceptively simple graphics, the multi-layered humour, the quality of the scripting and dialogue. The storyline parodies Dungeons & Dragons-type fantasy role-playing, something I have no experience of, but which hooked me from the first page (shown in this post). It’s also a parody of  childhood drawing and story-telling conventions: the use of stick-men to tell the story (e.g. the enemies of “The Order Of The Stick” are known as “The Linear Guild”); in the second printed book, the author re-caps what happened in the previous story by drawing the characters as finger-puppets; stories providing historical background are drawn with wax crayons; etc.

You can read all of the story to date on the website, which might take a while as he’s posted 644 cartoons to date, or I recommend signing up to receive his posts 3 times a week through rss feed.