New Year, New Sig

When they say "sometimes it's the little things," that ain't no joke. Especially something so serious as a signature, especially one that adorns a cartoon. It's the pinnacle of branding, second in importance only to a logo as far as the unique distillation and encapsulation of one's artistic identity and marketing image. Not really, since the pseudoscience of graphology is as equally illegitimate for either signatures or lettering. But for the first post of the year, here's a sneak peek at the new chicken-scratch of a scrawl that'll eventually replace the one perfected over many years of practice. It'll be a few more months before it shows up in print, and a few more after that before making an appearance here on Ink & Snow. But file this post under "for those of our viewers keeping score at home."

Geez that makes for four major makeovers in my recent artistic journey. It's only been since 2021-ish that I - creatively speaking - yanked out the rug from under my own two feet by voluntarily flipping the ratio of color panels versus the traditional black & white ones on its head. Now it's comparatively rare that I leave anything grayscale. Then, a few years later, there was an existential crisis of realizing I hated the way I was using color digitally, and decided to change that. 

Now what's as unconsciously second nature as tying a shoelace has to be methodically practiced until perfect. Technically I've been digitally cut-and-pasting a stock signature for my headers on the feature panel for decades now (not exactly when the most recent one first started getting used), it was more of a stylistic choice as opposed to (just) being lazy. Still it feels new, it feels like a private little spit-shine: I like the playfulness of moving the dot over the "j" thereby making it lower-case,  and shortening the overall length. 

"ahhh... now I see"