My personal journey in color

An old friend of mine by the name of Mike Untiedt who is a Denver painter of western art, once told me that in real life, shadows are never black.  He paints all the shadow areas of his painting in blue.
Why do cartoonists who are now doing color still outline the images of color with black lines?  Somethings are hard to do away with.  It is almost like we are afraid that if we do no outline the images in black that there will not be any diffinition of the form. 

 So what am I trying to do with this cartoon blog?  I thought it was going to be a simple little place to share my cartoons and gags and that would be it. 
So what is the difference between a painting and a cartoon anyway?  Sometimes when looking at a painting by some big shot painter who is supposed to be pouring out his or her soul onto canvas I say to my self, "Nice but where is the punch line?" 

In my opinion one of the best cartoonist ever was Pablo Picaso. So maybe the big difference between cartoons and fine art is that cartoons are really abstract version of real life?  
  In my first cartoon the subject is Starlings,  I call them the acrobats of the bird world and am always amazed at the way thousands of little black birds can fly in absolute formations.  Thousands of birds flying as one unit.  Sort of like a flock of locus and like locus eating everything in site. 
A friend of mine from California calls them flying pigs and being that they are not native to North America are eating stuff that the native birds would normally eat and thusly killing off the local native birds in the process.

The second cartoon is just a silly thought about bees telling a bear to buzz off.