We still rent. We’ve been saving up to buy a house for a goodly while, but we’re continuing to save so that we can make a big hunk-a-hunk-a burning down-payment. As my son was getting bigger, our apartment was starting to feel smaller. Much smaller. So, about a year ago, we switched to a rental townhouse. We chose one with a semi-finished basement (concrete floors) and three bedrooms. That’s one bedroom for us, one for our son, and one to use as an office/studio.

Well, the time has come, as I suspected it might (and as followers of my Twitter feed have seen clues) for the upstairs office to make way for a third bedroom. (Yay! but Boo!) Last weekend, I moved my studio into the dank recesses of the spider-infested basement. Sort of.

See, I’ve worked digitally for a long time, and for years that meant drawing first on paper, at least for pencils/initial inks, and then finishing with a Wacom tablet on my desktop PC. But then, about two years ago, I bought a tablet PC (a Toshiba Tecra M7, to be exact). The Wacom caused an evolutionary leap in my working methods, and the tablet PC did the same. Today, location matters much less, because my studio is really this:

To make things a little more comfortable, I often like to use:

It’s because of the tablet PC that I was able to keep up making comics during numerous trips to Japan in 2008 (it was a bumper year for travel), without having to drag around a bag-full of art supplies, oversized paper, etc. I still like working in traditional media, and someday I think I’d like to graduate to a Cintiq on the digital side, but for now, this is a great set-up for producing a thrice-weekly comic strip.

FYI, I’ve not yet finished the basement set-up, so if anyone’s interested in seeing photos, let me know, and I’ll try to post some. Same goes for details on my experiences with the tablet PC–if you’re interested, I’d be glad to drone on endlessly about it