Thursday, March 19, 2015

Origin Story--Throwback Thursday


The cartoon that started it all.  <3


But when did Lucy really start?  

In 2009 I considered writing a written blog, one based on my life but with pseudonyms to protect myself in my workplace.  It was going to be called "Lucy and the Lion's Den" and would showcase Lucy, Leo her husband, and their baby son Luke.  But I didn't get beyond naming the characters, because I found that writing a fictionalized rant about my own life was too draining.  If I wanted it to be real rants, then I wasn't going to post about it publicly (also, I didn't want to lose my job and many of my rants were work related).

I came home to mom around full-time when another baby was born.  That year I did more art than I have in ages when I illustrated an eBook version of "Little Women."

But once the book was published, the art waned.

Fastforward to 2014 and I was bitten by the Bitstrips bug.  I put off buying the app because I thought that I could do better.  But I didn't.  I mean I just didn't do any art at all to tell my story.  Like most people, I scoffed at the badly conceived Bitstrips scenes and sneered at some of the captions they provide. The ability to change my characters movements and the captions on the computer made me warm up to the Facebook version. Then, after a while, I was back to feeling rather frustrated with their whole setup and its limitations. The artist in me was gnashing her teeth.

So I began to write down ideas.




In the dentist's waiting room I started to character sketch.  (This guy really needs to make it into the comic sometime.)




Over the course of a few short weeks, I doodled some more--more ideas, more expressions.




Then I put the question out to my friends.  Should I go with my gut and start rolling out a weekly web comic? I was asking like I pretended that I had time outside of momming around all day.)

And after 13 likes and these replies...




 I started Lucy & the Lion's Den.

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