Monthly Archives: August 2014

Trifecta!

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It’s Friday. I have inadvertently snapped my cherished prescription sunglasses in two. There’s a large blister on my left ankle. The universe continues to aggressively overlook my sublime genius. My husband is blasting pop hits from the ’70s through his speakers. So it’s looking like a 3-mandala kind of day.

Sometimes, things get very crazy internally.

Sometimes, things get very crazy internally.

These are old mandalas, and I don’t remember drawing then, or what was going through my head when I did, but they’re all pretty exuberant and cheerful. Sort of expansive, as if they wanted to encompass all the generative power of the universe.

Sometimes a single piece of paper cannot contain the intricacies of the mind.

Sometimes a single piece of paper cannot contain the intricacies of the mind.

They’re also all very free and unrestrained, drawn without the squawking voice of the inner critic complaining about an inherent lack of perfection. If these mandalas were people, they’d be participating in the Body Love Conference.

This one is pretty pleasing and pleasant.

This one is pretty pleasing and pleasant.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling much more centered now.

This is a litmus test to see if your sense of humor matches mine

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If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, you might have noticed a certain exuberant satisfaction to his voice whenever he describes the eating of one unwilling organism by another faster or stronger or more clever organism. “Take that, life” his intonation seems to say. “You have been consumed by one more powerful and more deserving than you, and in any case, ha! There is a finality to all things, and yours has come. Now let us celebrate the continuation of life through the destruction of life, admiring the rightness of the situation.” Or maybe I read too much into his tone.

Original scan, Squid vs Whale

Original sketch, Squid vs Whale

Anyway, like many nerd girls, I vastly admire cephalopods in all their forms, and like anyone with a spark of imagination, I cannot help but sit in awe of any sort of megafauna: giant squids, of course, and just as naturally, the world’s largest animal, the blue whale, who is really a remarkable creature. This is probably the fastest and easiest finished design in my Red Bubble store. The sketch itself was done after looking at a few photographs, and the digital design required no augmentation. It’s a bit threadbare in one sense, but I love the way the colors pop on a black background.

A T-shirt for people who enjoy hugging.

A T-shirt for people who enjoy hugging.

You can get this T-shirt in a variety of colors and styles, but I do think the black backgrund works best. If you’re going to go for this kind of dubious humor, you might as well make it stand out. It is also kind of cute as a tote bag or a sticker.

Wear your heart on your shoulder.

Wear your heart on your shoulder.

Dragon at Work; Dragon at Rest

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The world wants a little cheering up today, and these unconventional dragons are happy to serve their purpose. 

Grizeldi, a Dragon Boat. Grizeldi is a working dragon

Grizeldi, a Dragon Boat. Grizeldi is a working dragon

I was a working dragon myself today. Still retaining a couple freelance writing clients enables me to bang out words in exchange for money. Writing is my especial talent, just as cutting through the glacial blue waters of the Norwegian fjords is Grizeldi’s. He takes pride in his sturdy wooden construction and his ability to transport a heavy cargo of pillage, plunder, and loot. 

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Portia, a Hoarding Dragon. Portia’s hoard is a small one, as she is a small dragon and has not had much time to accumulate it, but it is a high quality hoard.

Meanwhile, Portia slumbers upon a bed of gold pieces. Dragons require a great deal of rest.  

Ode to the World’s Most Horrible Cat

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This is actually a sketch of Algernon, who passed away a few weeks ago. If Lupin noticed I was drawing her portrait she would deliberately move every 15 seconds.

This is actually a sketch of Algernon, who passed away a few weeks ago. If Lupin noticed I was drawing her portrait she would deliberately move every 15 seconds and probably try to take the pencil out of my hand. Just imagine a fluffy black ball of evil with poisonous yellow eyes.

I’m not much of a poet. But Lupin is not much of a cat.

Lupin, a Long-Hair

I am a kitty with fur so fine
I sit on your things to prove that they’re mine
I know that you love me because I’m divine
I love you too but won’t give you a sign

You scream at dead mousies? I’ll bring you some more
You don’t need these books, right? I’ll knock them to the floor
You’re trying to sleep now? I’ll scratch on this door
You cleaned up my fur dread? I’ll just shed four

When your stepkids pet me I’ll scratch at their faces
When your husband gets dressed I’ll eat his bootlaces
When you drop your elastics I’ll hide them in places
When you invite friends in I’ll lick without graces

Because I’m the queen I must always be free
Because there’s a window I must climb up to see
Because I’m the kitty I’ll tell you the key
Because you’re my person you must always love me

(This sketch is from an exercise in the Trickster’s Hat that I did not do properly. But it’s a nice sketch of a cat much more lovable than the one in whose honor I dashed these verses.)

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

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If your car has to break down in the middle of the desert on a summer’s day someplace you don’t get any cell reception, a national park is a good place for it to happen. Instead of dying of dehydration or getting stranded for the weekend, you can get federal employees to make phone calls and bring you ice water. If you’re lucky, a kindly family of Dutch tourists will invite you to share their picnic lunch under the ramada.

A fast sketch of the Eldon Ruins

A fast sketch of the Eldon Ruins

After a productive week on retreat (15,000 words, 47 layout thumbnails, 5 blog posts, and 3 book reviews, and 1 workshop plus the side trip to the Grand Canyon), my husband instructed me not to come home too fast, so he could have a chance to clean up the evidence of his bachelor lifestyle before I arrived. I decided to check out the Eldon Pueblo before I left Flagstaff. It’s an extremely accessible site compared to a lot of Sinagua ruins, and fairly extensive, and also more pleasant to visit than many, since it’s in a grassy and wooded area rather than on a barren, treeless hill.

From there, I drove 50 miles to one of my favorite places on earth, Montezuma Well, which houses another lovely set of ruins. This is where my car stopped working. Eventually my car and I were towed to a garage, where I spent a cheerful 4 1/2 hours sitting outside (they didn’t have any AC!). Staying true to the spirit of retreat, the first thing I did was sketch my sad, broken down car, sitting in the parking lot, next to some agaves. You can also see the back end of a horse up on the hill.

 

The view from the Beaver Creek Auto Service Center

The view from the Beaver Creek Auto Service Center

Mainly, I just tried to stay hydrated and calm and trust that everything would be OK as I drew, read, and wrote. I was lucky to find a decent mechanic willing to put in the overtime to make sure I got home on a Friday afternoon! I was lucky to get an extra 5 1/2 hour adventure in the American southwest. It could have easily been much longer, and much more expensive.

 

Dimensionality: Still Life with Pachyderm

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It seems like some of my difficulties with perspective stem from the condition of strabismus exotropia, which I’ve had since childhood. In short, I have no depth perception. Drawing dimensionality can be a challenge, but modeling seems much easier. Taking a break from writing my last night on retreat, I decided to go 3D with Sculpey.

The fruits of my labors. The quarter is for scale. I didn't have a banana because I made pancakes out of them.

The fruits of my labors. The quarter is for scale. I didn’t have a real banana because I made pancakes out of them.

Since the protagonist of my graphic novel is so influenced by turn-of-the-century boys’ colonialist adventure novels (this week I’ve read The Son of Tarzan and King Solomon’s Mines) an elephant seemed like the obvious place to start.

Look at his little tail! And his little tusks!

Look at his little tail! And his little tusks!

Besides, elephants just make people happy. They’re so big! But they’re smart! And social!

The other side of the elephant

The other side of the elephant

My little tusker is a proud bull, bearing the magnificent ivory appendages of his people.

There are plusses and minuses to working in miniature. I tend to feel more comfortable with small detail, but it’s so much easier to screw up, particularly to screw up something you’ve already gotten right. His tail must have fallen down ten times before he went into the oven, but it’s standing up pretty well now.

The banana is a bit lumpy for my taste. Maybe it's organic or something. I learned how to coil pots like this when I was a little girl.

The banana is a bit lumpy for my taste. Maybe it’s organic or something. I learned how to coil pots like this when I was a little girl.

Once Tantor was finished, I felt the motivation to continue, but with something simpler, so I went for an apple, which quite naturally led to a pear and a banana. From there, it made sense to coil a little fruit bowl.

Still life with modeling medium

Still life with modeling medium

I’m not ashamed to say it: Kawaii! Squee! Little tiny things!

Well, I wrote 3500 words today, meaning I’ve drafted approximately half the story this week. I’d hoped to get further, but 15,000 words is not a bad output for 4 1/2 days’ work.

 

Here’s a Spectacular Hodgepodge of I Don’t Know What

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Finding myself without any pithy observations regarding art, writing, or the intersection between the two, allow me instead to offer a completely random assortment of recent-ish images.

Let's call it a snake in the grass

Let’s call it a snake in the grass: torn paper mosaic from 2013

I’m pleased that today was a good day, writing-wise. Got about 3500 words out on this graphic novel script, which is nothing to sneeze at, although I could have done a few thousand more words if I’d been stern with myself.

Have a pointy mandala why not?

Have a pointy mandala why not? This one puts me in mind of a compass rose. It’s quite skewed.

I also read and critiqued a friend’s essay and discussed it in what was essentially a one-woman workshop. As an old veteran of Iowa-style workshop (I’ve taken 10 of those suckers, 6 at the graduate level) I can offer pretty good feedback. Would that I could read my own writing the way I read others’.

October 2013

October 2013 I apparently cut out some weird looking pumpkins. The one in the center is by far the saddest jack-o-lantern I have ever created.

This bulletin board is one I didn’t like well enough to put in my original gallery of bulletin boards, but it’s OK. Eventually, I’ll get them all up. The quote, if you can’t read it, is from Percy Bysshe Shelly: “There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky.” Since I have space considerations, and my target audience is on average, 8 years old, I often use small segments of quotes. This one continues,  “which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!”

Stories Start with Characters

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Got 3000 words written today, and hope to get another 1000 before bed. Also finished reading Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, which is among the most delightful instructional manuals I’ve ever read. Eisner had an intricate understanding of not only drawing and writing, but of human psychology, and this last was effective to two ends: it allowed him to tell compelling stories about believable people (even if those people were caricatures of regular people, or more amazing than regular people), and it allowed him to tell those stories in such a way that readers remained interested in the work.

Eisner's "Contract" with the Reader

Eisner’s “Contract” with the Reader

Above is one of my favorite panels from this book, illustrating the contract with the reader: the artist may safely assume that the reader lives in the same reality and shares many of the same basic understandings of the world. This allows the art to work as a form of shorthand: i.e., you don’t need to explain to your reader that a coconut released from a tree will descend in the direction of the earth’s core, or that coconuts grow on trees, or that trees drop seeds.

This book has vast quantities of things to recommend it, and even if you’re not interested in drawing or writing or storytelling or human psychology, some of the reprints will certainly be worth your time: Eisner’s beautiful new ending to Franz Kafka’s bleak The Trial, and an example of “compression” by R. Sikoryak comprising Dante’s Inferno retold in 10 Bazooka Joe comics were my favorites.

If you’re here for my art, and particularly if you’re here for my dragons, never fear. I’ve got a couple of compelling characters for you right here:

Sophia Violetta Regalia, a heraldic dragon

Sophia Violetta Regalia, a heraldic dragon

Obviously, there need to be as many, if not more, girl dragons than boy dragons.

Pentalara, a serpentine dragon who could probably benefit from some orthodontia, if she could find an orthodontist willing to work on a dragon's mouth.

Pentalara, a serpentine dragon who could probably benefit from some orthodontia, if she could find an orthodontist willing to work on a dragon’s mouth.

These lovely ladies certain exude personality.

Side Trip to a Big Hole

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My traveling companion wanted to meet up with an old friend she hadn’t seen in 30 years. He works as a singing cowboy on the Grand Canyon Railroad and she is interviewing people about the intersection between art and culture. Normally, I wouldn’t spend that much time away from my desk on writing retreat, but this promised to be a special sojourn.

Singing cowboys for the win! The one on the right is my friend's friend, and he was very wonderful.

Singing cowboys for the win! The one on the right is my friend’s friend, and he was very wonderful.

My friend’s friend got us on the train for free, for which I was grateful. It’s a pricey experience, even at the lower levels of luxury, and the train takes about 3 times as long as it would to drive (135 minutes to go 65 miles). Since we were friends with the cowboy, we got some freebies and were able to hang out on the back of the caboose and watch the track peel away behind us, which I have wanted to do my entire life. (Yes, it was everything I envisioned.)

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No picture of the Grand Canyon does it justice, which basically makes my attempts to sketch it kind of futilely hilarious.

While my friend went off to reminisce about the old times and do some preliminary interviewing, I walked along the rim a bit and did a little writing and a lot of sketching. The problems with sketching the Grand Canyon are a) it’s huge, b) there’s a lot going on visually, and c) the shadows change every 15 seconds.

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Sorry about this reproduction. I very seriously considered bringing the scanner with me to Flagstaff. I would have used it! But I was afraid it would get hurt/broken.

The Grand Canyon is an impressionist’s fantasy. It’s all light and shadow. It was hard to render in pencil. When I did try to focus on the dark parts, the clouds kept moving, so the dark parts kept changing. I’m not dissatisfied with this attempt. If I had kept at it longer, I think it would have improved. The digital drawing tablet might have rendered better results, but the sun shone too brightly to really use the computer.

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The shadow knows…

After I got frustrated with the first sketch, I mailed some postcards to my nephews and sat down in a different place, thinking of focusing on a smaller section of the landscape. Before I started, I noticed that the tree above me cast some interesting shadows on the paper, and I decided to just draw the shadows, as an easier exercise. My sketch is not quite as awesome as the shadows were, plus you can see through to the next page. Oh, well.

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A few details

Then I decided to focus on one tiny canyon, which you can see in the middle, before getting distracted by some interesting trees. The trees are not bad for the time spent.

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Tiny details

Here I try a couple views of a squashed pine cone and a bit of pine that fell on the walkway. All in all, I’m really glad I went, but maybe I shouldn’t have walked so much. I could have gotten more accomplished.

Drawing about Writing

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Living alone, incursions into the writing space were few and far between, but with a family it can be hard to find those broad, uninterrupted swaths of time in which to think of nothing but art. For the last couple years, I’ve had to rely on writing retreats, some taken solo, and some taken with other like-minded artists. Today, I’m on retreat in Flagstaff, working on a new book, and it may not come as a surprise that I’ve decided to try my hand at the graphic novel medium.

Three useful texts

Three useful texts

Lacking the time or money for a low-res MFA in graphic storytelling, I’ve been reading voraciously on the subject. The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil has by far been the most useful resource on the subject, answering many questions about how to draft a script, and how words and images relate to one another in this format. Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics is massive and detailed, offering excellent advice for artists. I’m still working on the Will Eisner book; although I’ve not got very far into it, it definitely offers a very different perspective and set of advice. Eisner basically invented the modern graphic novel format.

The Stan Lee book is probably most useful to those who have already learned quite a bit about figure, landscape, and perspective, and just want to know how to translate that into drawing Marvel-style comics. I’m still looking for some old copies of the books that everyone seems to recommend for those wishing to learn more about figure drawing, which are any of the “Dynamic” drawing books written by Burne Hogarth. I could order them from Amazon, but I have $125 credit at a local used book chain, and I’m still hoping to find what I want there, since their stock always changes.

One useful piece of advice from the DC book involves the use of “suggested layout” sketches, normally visual notes from the writer to the artist. While I do intend to do my own penciling, the idea of generating storyboards seems a good way to communicate to myself (the artist) in the future, while visualizing the book to myself (the writer) in the present. These panel mockups may change, but presently, they correspond with the script, which is divided, per Dennis O’Neil’s advice, into pages and panels.

Suggested layouts corresponding to the script

Suggested layouts corresponding to the script

Comics tend to start on the recto, or right hand page. My pages are marked R and L so I can keep rector and verso (left hand page) straight and ensure that 2-page spreads or splash pages, and pages where deliberate mirroring (pages 9 and 10 above) will actually be printed facing one another.