Creative Time Line

For any artist the journey from where they begin to where they finish is long one. When I tried to make my own after getting exposed to the world of caption art, it was a difficult task. The only thing I had at my disposal was MS paint. It's literally good for nothing. Not user friendly, very rigid, and more often than not would cause you to fly into a rage. It's not normal to spend hours making a single panel caption, yet like me at the time, many of us did. Having said that, I've broken my creativity into 3 parts.

The first generation of stuff I created is tagged First Gen, it's all the work I painstakingly did with MS paint. I spent so much time trying to control everything I could that I was going crazy. I was ready to call it quits until I was given the Comic Life comic strip creation program.* It was the most incredible game changer imaginable.

The tag Second Gen refers to the second generation of stuff, running time-wise from once I started to use Comic Life up until I took a long hiatus from captioning. Not that it ever stopped me from collecting pictures meant for captions, never a shortage of those. Over time I started to improve in every aspect of making a good looking caption. I could always write, but making something in a digital format takes a little know-how. I began to use a photo editing program* to make the pictures look really good. All aspects of using text boxes were tweaked. From their placement, look, and shadow to the text alignment inside of them. There were other smaller details done to streamline the process, but in the end my biggest obstacle to overcome was only myself. I could do everything I could think of with the Comic Life platform. Slowly captions began to fall into the current form I use now, a template that allows the story to flow while not taking anything away from the image. I was happy that I was able to get my own unique look. When you see a huge thumbnail page of all your captions, there's always a sense of pride and to some extent, awe too.

Up to this point, trading caption for caption was why I was making caps. I made some stuff on the side for fun, but 99% of the captions I made were for trade. It was always a treat when you found that like-minded person to trade with and you'd always get something impressive back when they were done. 

After taking a long break, I started to get creative again. This time I was just making caps for fun. I tagged all these New Era Cap. Being smarter this time around, I started to number my caps just for a sense of better organization. The first 110 captions are an even more refined version of the late second generation captions. Captions numbered 111 and above have a background added. I don't think I can get any more creative than that. 

That's all for now. Check out the development of an artist over the years... or the roadmap to my madness. Please leave comments and thoughts or something. It's good to see someone leave a footprint behind. Thanks for checking my stuff out.

* Note : This was entirely Courtney's fault. I was going to move on to something else to occupy my mind, but instead ended-up making a thousand or more caption panels... and I'm still making them.