Monthly Archives: November 2014

Dragon Comics 37

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Too many snakes spoil the view.

Too many snakes spoil the view.

In retrospect, axes and stilettos are not particularly funny weapons. Maybe battle axes are funnier than forest axes, and I’m thinking stiletto heels are almost certainly funnier than stiletto knives. I’m still working out this visual humor thing. Maybe I need to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? again. But in fact, this comic is a bit of a bridge, so maybe it’s more important to showcase Dragon’s anger than Dragon’s comedic timing.

Do I owe it to the reader to be funny all the time? My tradition puts the story in front of the tone. Maybe Friday’s story will lend itself to a better punchline. Definitely next Friday’s story will, in a cerebral way. But this arc is a little darker than usual.

So be it. I’m not for everyone. If you don’t get it, you can always go read The Family Circus.

Looking back over my notes, I see that I missed the marginal note explaining that, in panel 4, Dragon should be carrying a burlap sack, a coil of rope, and a roll of duct tape. I leave it to the reader to decide whether that would have made panel 4 funnier or bleaker.

Road Trip Memorabilia

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The day before we left on our epic Grand Canyon adventure, I was at Target looking for things to entertain kids when a thought occurred to me. The Man doesn’t use printed maps anymore, depending entirely on his phone for directions, so I thought it would be fun for the kids to buy a state map and mark our route on it as we traveled. It could provide a sense of perspective that you don’t get from a 5.7 inch diagonal display (The Man is a fan of his ZMAX phablet).

But what would we do with this map afterward? Would its destiny be to moulder amongst other forgotten relics of road trips past?

Perhaps influenced by my Trickster’s Hat experiments, I had another idea. I saved up all the ephemera from the trip (national park handouts and such) and printed out a couple dozen photos. (When was the last time I printed out photos? Maybe 2006! We didn’t even print our wedding pictures.) Then I mounted the photos on the map.

6 days of no holds barred sightseeing, compressed into a single rectangle.

6 days of no holds barred sightseeing, compressed into a single rectangle.

As it turned out, there wasn’t room for the ephemera. There were empty spaces, but none big enough for the inset maps or other things. Instead, I printed out a second round of photos with small details like flowers, petroglyphs, and animals, and added them like marginalia.

Close up on (most of) the route.

Close up on (most of) the route.

Then I remarked the route, color-coding it by day so you can easily see where we drove on each leg of the journey. We were gone for 6 days, which allowed me to make the color code a rainbow. Then I bordered each photo with the corresponding color so you can easily see on which day any particular image was taken.

Use this product to stick things to paper.

Use this product to stick things to paper.

This project is perhaps a bit craftier (rather than artier) than the stuff I usually do. As evidence, I present this glue product. I wasn’t sure what to use, so I asked the Cat, who is an accomplished scrapbooker. She recommended this stuff, which is a very sticky glue loosely affiliated with a waxy tape. You just run the device over the thing you wish to glue and the glue transfers effortlessly from the tape to your picture, and doesn’t wrinkle the paper like some glue does.

You have to be careful because it is extremely sticky. If you run the device over a spot you’ve already gotten glue on, it can jam the works; and once you place your image, it’s pretty difficult to get it back up again, so you need to get it right the first time.

I had the map professionally framed, because it’s a weird size and there was no way I could buy a frame off the rack. Although lately I wonder if I ought to learn how to frame things myself. They mounted it and made it look quite professional, and I picked it up this afternoon. The kids loved it. The framers loved it too.

Detail from days 5 and 6: hiking Boyton Canyon and the Sinagua ruins near Sedona.

Detail from days 5 and 6: hiking Boyton Canyon and the Sinagua ruins near Sedona.

 

Dragon Comic 36

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Obviously, there is nothing cool or fashionable about snakeskin.

Obviously, there is nothing cool or fashionable about snakeskin.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote 2 weeks of scripts all in one go, 3 pages single space. Go me. Sunday was Tucson’s All Souls Procession so I had to plan ahead since I presume I will have been downtown all day. Sitting down and writing by hand in a notebook is really pleasurable. It sort of stimulates the child mind and sends me back into the past.

The Fox was telling me about attending a writing event and being forced to participate in an activity he felt was a waste of his time. He decided to “get back his roots” by writing a short story in the margins of the handout for the session. It reminded me of the novel I started writing in pencil in a black and white composition notebook during American history junior year.

It’s a different way of writing entirely, completely selfish and self-involved. The paper draws me in, in a way that a computer doesn’t. It’s hard to ignore distractions on a computer something’s always flashing, there’s always another tab. You can flip from thought to thought without taking your eyes away from the screen. It’s harder to look away when you’re actively engaged with a piece of paper.

I actually started a short story on paper during our Grand Canyon trip, but, like the 4 other short stories I’ve started this year, it just sort of drifted away from me. They’re all ideas I was really excited about, but short fiction has never been my forte. I’m more successful seeing through to the end vast sweeping epics. And now this comic, which is like an epic series of microfictions.

Dragon Comics 35

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dragon comic 35_edited-1

 

In the high stakes arena of men’s fashion and personal grooming, there is no competition more manly than the World Beard and Mustache Championship, an event currently sponsored by the World Beard and Mustache Association (WBMA). Beginning with (probably) a German club in 1990, this event celebrates shocking, luxurious, and artistic facial hair, which has been judged and found worthy by men of discerning taste.

Here are some details:

  • The beard modeled by The Man in panel 2 was grown by a German man named Willi Chevalier, winner of the Freestyle Chin-Beard prize in 2013, described as a “world famous international bearding superstar.” The super cool T-shirt is, of course, 3 Wolf Moon.
  • In panel 3, The Man is wearing nyan cat, and sporting the even more ludicrous 2013 winner of the Freestyle Full Beard competition, grown by Aarne Bielefelte, whose Facebook fan page identifies him as an athlete and “self taught beardgrower.”
  • Panel 4’s look has been lifted wholesale from rock and roll legend, facial hair enthusiast, and all-around dangerous hombre Billy Gibbons. The guitarist and vocalist for ZZ Top is immediately identifiable by his wild red beard and favors a hat resembling a dirty mop.
  • In panel 1, the man is not picking flowers, but pulling weeds, specifically, a pernicious invasive species in the American west known as goathead. Dragon is demonstrating the yoga pose uttanasana, a standing forward bend.

 

Your Thursday Center

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Today’s mandala makes me a little nostalgic. I drew it for a friend, or a woman I thought was my friend. At the time, we saw each other regularly, often going out to lunch. When I showed her the image and explained that she had inspired it, she said, “That’s perfect.”

Some images really capture the essence of a person.

Some images really capture the essence of a person. 

Then she dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, I know she still exists. Now and then I’ll see something from the business she was talking about starting when she disappeared from my life. The last I heard from her, though, she said she would come to a party at my house, and didn’t. I have a couple ideas about why, but it’s only conjecture.

She was really important to me, and it bums me out that I couldn’t offer her whatever it was that she wanted in the friendship. As a kid, I couldn’t hold on to friends pretty often. As an adult, I have many strong and longterm friendships, but somehow that just makes it even sadder when someone decides to move on.

It’s an unconventional mandala for me, based on a principle of 4, with large flowers in girly colors. The flowers are strong, though, with only a few delicate tips. That’s how my friend was. Square and unconventional, girly and tough. It always seems strange to me that in all these years we’ve never bumped into each other. Possibly, it’s because she always sees me first. I wish her well.

 

Dragon Comics 34

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Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

In reality, you won’t catch The Man outside without shoes, but let’s imagine that Dragon talked him into a good faith effort at practicing yoga. For the sake of the visual gag, of course.

Somersaulting down a hill backward: now, that’s real. It’s a lot easier than it looks, and it’s good fun. You’ve just got to be careful about your cervical spine, which is not a problem for Dragon in any event, because Dragon’s skeleton is a lot tougher than a human’s, and more resilient, and some of Dragon’s external parts function as an exoskeleton. Dragon is very tough.

Yes, I’ve thought this out.

This comic really came down to the wire. What with the election and the crying afterward, there wasn’t much time in the day for drawing and writing. I’d love to get a bit of a backlog again. There was a nice one before I went to the Grand Canyon. Now it seems like every night I’m racing the clock. How do people even draw dailies? I suppose the people who do that probably draw better than I do. What about those artists drawing 2 to 4 dailies? Maybe they don’t have families.

Anyway: Dragon can curl up into a perfect ball and then roll down a hill. That’s basically the essence of the joke here.

3-Dimensional Dragon!

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One of the obstacles I must overcome as I learn to draw is that I personally lack almost any true form of depth perception. Most of my life, I’ve exhibited a condition known as strabismus exotropia; I am typically either seeing through my left eye or my right eye, but, as a general rule, not both eyes at the same time. Whereas most people receive stereo data from two points, which are combined by the brain into one three-dimensional picture, people with exotropia lack binocular vision and tend to perceive the world as being somewhat flat.

Although I wear rather extreme prism lenses for this condition, they only really work to a distance of a few feet, and then only rarely, when I’m well rested and looking intently at something in ideal lighting conditions. At the slightest hint of eye strain, one eye will bow out and let the other soldier on alone, only shouldering the burden when the other eye throws in the towel.

I get a lot of headaches.

More to the point, this means that I have to work extra hard to understand depth. Dimensionality takes a lot of extra effort.

In order to draw yesterday’s comic, I wanted some way to be certain that what I guessed Dragon’s front view would look like actually reflected what Dragon’s front view would look like. To that end, I made a 3-dimensional Dragon in Sculpey.

Look, Ma! No eyes!

Look, Ma! No eyes!

There’s the proof. No eyes.

I wanted this model for other reasons as well, to help me begin experimenting with dimensionality and perspective in this comic, so I could see Dragon from various angles and understand how the body would appear, and how the different parts might move.

Well, hello there, gorgeous!

Well, hello there, gorgeous!

This model is just under 3 inches high, which is fairly big for a baked clay model. In order to create a figure of this size that could stand alone on 2 legs, I needed to prop it up with a scaffolding (eventually, 3 unopened bars of Sculpey) as I was building it, and then offer it some extra support in the oven (provide by a small glass dish and a strategically placed knife and spoon).

Even so, Dragon does seem a bit off kilter, weaving to one side like a drunk college freshman walking into a big dance. Plus, those finger nails are off the hook; I gave up on keeping them straight long before Dragon got in the oven. I’m frankly amazed they’re still attached, considering how all the little details fell off my last set of Sculpey models. Although it’s easier to work with, in many ways, than real clay, it’s not as strong or sturdy.

Can I help you?

Can I help you?

I tried to make both sides a little different, but the way the figure settled in the oven pulled it lopsided anyway. Still, this should be an effective tool.

 

 

 

Dragon Comics 33

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I suspected this would become a problem early on, no matter how great Dragon looks in profile.

Professional comic artists, people who draw better than I do but perhaps not quite as well as they’d like, typically maintain massive clip files of art, so that they always have references for whatever pose or setting they’d like to draw. Fine artists usually spend a lot of time with live models, again providing them with extensive data on which they can depend when sketching. At the very least, many artists make use of articulated wooden models, which help them understand how the human body is put together and able to move. Barring that, today, if you’ve got a good connection and basic Google-fu, there’s a decent chance that you can find a photographic example of whatever’s inside your mind, if what you want is a fairly common thing from a fairly ordinary perspective.

Even so, you can’t find everything. Certain angles are just not represented in GIS. For example, in Dragon Comic 29, panel 3, I knew that I wanted to draw The Man squatting as he picked Dragon, and I was easily able to find many visual examples of this pose online, but most of them were intended as instruction for athletes, and for educational purposes shot either straight on from the front, or slightly angled from the side. There weren’t as many direct shots from the side, which is what I needed, so I had to extrapolate. And even so, The Man still curves his back in a non-ergonomic fashion. I image that he straightened out before he began lifting, so as not to hurt himself. He’s bigger than Dragon, but Dragon’s no featherweight, either.

Sometimes, I take pictures of myself in certain poses to help me see how to draw them. The more comics I draw, the less I have to do this.

The thing I couldn’t imagine, or Google, or photograph, of course, was my main character’s head. I could guess how it might look straight on, but I couldn’t be certain because there’s no frame of reference and my relationship with perspective is tricky. When I had the idea for comic 33, I needed a way to double check that what existed in my mind made sense in the reality of the comic, which I will discuss in tomorrow’s post. Like the smashing of the fourth wall, I think this new technique in my arsenal will help add more dimension to what the rabbit correctly asserted is a rather two-dimensional set of illustrations.