Artists who work in one medium are often intimidated by new ones. They might be afraid that the new medium requires a different approach to art, or that they will not have enough experience with it, or that they don’t have access to the equipment needed. But whatever their reasons for being hesitant, many find that the new medium opens up creative possibilities they had never dreamed of.

The reason for this is simple: every artistic medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and artists are only just beginning to explore what those are. With each new medium comes a fresh way of seeing things.

Artists who try their hand at line art tend to notice how much more emphasis it puts on line than on color or shading. An object can be drawn using only lines, as in cartoons or newspaper comic strips. The lines in turn can be simple or elaborate, but they always dominate the image. Thinking about line-only art can help artists understand why line work is so often used in comics and cartoons: it is a very economical way of getting an image across. On the other hand too much emphasis on lines can make an image feel stiff and even cold.

The fact that line art relies on lines means that it has less detail than pictures made with shading, which makes some

There’s a whole, big, beautiful world out there, and I’ve only scratched the surface. In fact, I haven’t even left my own country yet. But hopefully, by the time I’m your age, I’ll have seen a little more of it – and maybe even helped to make it a little better.

I’m going to try. And if I don’t succeed, at least I’ll have tried.

So you be good, okay? Because you’re my one shot at being proud of you.

Love you always, Mom

If you are going to use a computer to create art, you need to know some of its limitations.

There are two kinds of limitations: technical and aesthetic. Technical limitations are the ones that result from your choice of equipment, such as resolution or memory size, or from what you have learned so far, such as basic photo editing skills or familiarity with a particular program. That is, they are the sort of things that would be eliminated if you had more money and skills.

Aesthetic limitations have to do with the nature of the medium. They are inherent in the subject matter or in what you want to say with it, and they impose restrictions on how good your final product can be. You cannot change these restrictions no matter how much money you have or how skilled you become; they’re inherent in the way computers work.

The idea of the meme, a word I have just made up, is to focus on the way ideas and customs spread, or jump from brain to brain. That’s what fashion is, and fads, and catch-phrases and most advertising. What we have not seen before is a natural mechanism for making people care about each other enough to do this systematically. And if there is no such mechanism, then it isn’t only that society will collapse if something doesn’t replace the family; it is also that no kind of society will ever emerge in the first place.

And this may be a bad time to be saying so. But I think that love is more important than sex. It’s not that sex isn’t important; obviously it is; but love and hate are more basic. People who don’t like each other can still have sex all night (I’m thinking now of some friends of mine). But people who don’t love each other can’t even cooperate long enough to have sex unless they’re drunk or taking drugs or both.

The basic structure of a comic strip adheres to traditional storytelling conventions. A panel is a unit of time, and a sequence is a sequence of panels. The reader sees one panel at a time, and the action in each panel must flow from panel to panel.

It is tempting for the cartoonist to fill the panels with too much information. This leads to confusion and clutter. Less really is more. It’s better to have less panels and tell your story more clearly than to have way too many panels that are not helpful or effective in communicating your message.

A good story will always work with fewer panels than it seems like it needs. If you’re having trouble getting all your ideas into the allotted space, remember that you can always make the panels bigger, but you can’t make them smaller. In most cases, you’ll find that your ideas fit more comfortably into fewer panels than you might think.*

The difference between the two paths is not that one is right and the other wrong. It’s that one path is open to you, and the other is closed.

I am not saying you should drop out of school. I went to college, and if it hadn’t been for a few teachers who saw my potential, I would have dropped out sooner rather than later. But I want to make sure you understand why this choice is so important.

I’m talking about an opportunity gap as well as an income gap. The more education you get, the more opportunities are available to you, and the greater your chance of success in any of them. If you were thinking about being a writer or a musician or an actor, it probably wouldn’t occur to you that there was anything odd about that—it’s no different from what your parents expected of you when they sent you to college. But becoming a programmer might seem different because programming was your idea. In fact it’s no different at all; becoming a programmer is just another way of fulfilling your parents’ dreams through your own ambition rather than theirs. Whatever ambition drew you to computers in the first place will have expanded as you learned more about them, just as mine did when I was a kid reading science fiction on long

By default, the elements of a line drawing are in front of the background. So to create the illusion of depth, an artist has to leave some clues that certain objects are behind others. The most common technique is to make them slightly darker.

The reason for this is partly artistic; it’s more pleasing to have the darker areas recede than advance. But it is also partly an accident of history. In pre-photography days, artists had to use colored chalk or paint, and so they made the light parts white and the dark parts black (or sometimes red, for flesh tones). Black ink would have been too expensive and time-consuming to use for shading, so papers were not generally made black on the back. This meant that black lines on a white background would show up best, which was fortunate because black ink was all they had. The convention stuck even after photography made using colored inks practical, which meant that if you started with a black-and-white picture and then added color, you had to use shades of grey instead of colored inks.

So computers inherited this technological history when they