Author Archives: littledragonblue

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About littledragonblue

Dreamer, Writer, Artist, Lover

Back to School 2018: Lions Launching!

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“Launching” and “stellar” are probably big vocabulary words for a sizable portion of my intended audience, but they’re coming to learn, right?

I’m on a roll with these retro rocket ships!

When I first started doing bulletin boards I never wanted for inspiration; there was always some big idea that I couldn’t wait to try, but now that I’ve been at it 9 years (NINE YEARS!) (averaging 5 or 6 a year, so let’s say about 50 total) and I hate the idea of repeating myself, at least in the same forum, sometimes I have to reach a bit for new material.

The school where I volunteer starts up Thursday, so I had to cram this into my schedule (Tuesday night was the big back-to-school, sign-up-for-the-PTA, eat popcorn and wander around the campus open house, and I managed to get the bulk of the work finished before the school was deluged with parents and kids) not knowing what the plan was, but once I got there I remembered how much fun I had drawing the retro rocket for my “The Future is Non Binary and Intersectional” T-shirt, and once I had that idea, the rest of it fell into place. The rocket and the lion cubs and the paw print and the flames were easy to design: a lot of these elements were ones I had worked with before and the Girl helped me on the first day. She’s really good at peeling excess rubber cement off things.

Then I went back the next day and did the lettering. Something was clearly disconnected in my brain because I measured the space available, calculated how big each letter could be, and then completely disregarded my own calculations and made each letter about 5 centimeters too wide. Thus the bizarre/organic spacing. My original plan was to cut out some of the text that ended up in the word bubble, but the families were already there and it’s a lot of letters that wouldn’t have fit anyway and I decided to just hand ink it and slap it on as a word balloon, which took 5 minutes, versus the 2 hours sketching and cutting would have taken.

The principal loved it. All the teachers loved it. Someone called me “faithful.” As I was leaving the school, I saw a parent taking a photo of my bulletin board! Also a kid trying to read it out loud who clearly didn’t know the words “launching” or “stellar.” Success!

The Future is Non Binary and Intersectional

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Featuring one of the most charming retro style rocket ships I’ve ever drawn.

This rainbow colored design took up most of my drawing time this week. I’m the kind of person who could easily spend another week tinkering with it but I’m also the kind of person who can let it go. It’s cute and it gets the message across. “The Future is Non Binary and Intersectional.” I prefer “nonbinary” spelled as one word, actually, but this is how it went up in the shop.

The main thing is that I’m sick of people using erroneous binary assumptions to tell other people (me) how to dress, act, think, talk, or fit into society. Open your freaking mind.

You can get this design on 56 different products including T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, and pillows, in my RedBubble shop.

Requiem for a Machine

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That damn cat, though. Seriously.

ItsI amazing that I managed to log in to this account on my phone in the first try. It took 2 days to remember my Reddit password and I still haven’t gotten into Twitter. Guess I’ll buy a new laptop tomorrow, but I’m not happy about it. Also not happy about blogging on my phone. After 3 days of sliding around a 1.5″ x 2.5″ keyboard, it’s time to concede defeat. I gotta have a real machine.

More Monsoon Comics: Giant Bug Edition

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For some reason, some people don’t appreciate the beauty of a giant beetle flying into things and dying tragically in your swimming pool filter.

The ASDM webpage on which I found the reference photo of the larval beetle offers this statement of caution for desert motorcycle enthusiasts who don’t wear helmets: “Being hit in the face by a beetle this size can be quite painful.” That’s probably an understatement; one flew into my head earlier this month and I wasn’t even coming toward it at 60 miles an hour and it still felt like being hit by a rock.

Anyway, I think these creatures are fascinating, and, for whatever reason, they don’t feel like cockroaches to me. My response to cockroaches is visceral and immediate; if one crosses my path, I feel compelled to smash it as if it’s a vicious, carnivorous alien (even though cockroaches are harmless, vegetarian, and have been around longer than humans). My response to giant palo verde beetles is, “Cool! It’s a giant bug!” And then I take a picture and send it to my nephew or something. He’s at a prime age to appreciate giant bugs.

My first script had the final panel as some snarky remark about how maybe these insects had it all figured out and maybe we’d be better off if we spent our childhood and adolescence underground and then had thirty days to mate before dying, leaving the next generation to figure things out on its own. Then I thought I’d go for a straight biology story, with only a little snark. Then I finished the artwork and thought the panels looked kind of blank, so I put the snark back in, in word balloon form. That’s why the text doesn’t quite fit the space.

Monsoon: Prayers for Rain

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Until you’ve known the pressure of summer one you can’t love the release of summer two.

Oh, god, I’m so pleased with this comic, especially the first and last panels, but also the sense of motion in the second panel. The guy in the third panel could look more oppressed by the heat, but anyway I drew this without any help from Photoshop or the digital tablet. Just pencil, paper, and a ruler (OK and some reference photos) (OK I fixed a few lines in Photoshop after I scanned it because I’d already lost my eraser). Somehow, just sitting down and committing to doing it is the hardest part, yet, it didn’t take me any longer than it would have had I used the computer, and I’m still happier than I’ve been with the more polished stuff you get with more advanced tools. The drawing part start to finish took about an hour. I never know how long it takes me to write things. My lettering probably needs work.

It’s monsoon in Tucson, and it rained intermittently all day, which is lovely and refreshing and also kind of heavy and bittersweet. The Girl, who is now a full-fledged teenager, said she had been wishing for a full day of rain. Can you even wholly appreciate the beauty of a rainy day until you’ve been a teenage girl?

Hold on Loosely, but Don’t Let Go

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Sorry about that shady looking butterfly. I was on a schedule.

Thinking about this lately. There are people who make a deep dent in your heart while they occupy it, and you can’t buff it out when they go. I guess I’m fortunate to only have a few people like that; with one or two exceptions, I’m still friends with everyone I’ve ever dated or hooked up with, although sometimes it takes a while to get past the hurt and rekindle a friendship. I don’t burn bridges. I don’t hold grudges (too much).

I still have those size 4 jeans. Damn, my ass looked good in them, for the 15 minutes of my adult life I wore a size 4. Unless American really does descend into anarchy and there’s no food and I end up in a camp for dissidents, I do not anticipate ever stuffing myself into them again, but some small part of me still holds out hope. The pot did get tossed, although not without a lot of anxiety. Like, I took a photograph of it, and I had to squelch the urge to go rescue it for the next couple hours. Fortunately, we left town so I didn’t have an opportunity to grab a broken pot (which was old when I acquired it second-hand in 1992). A lot of memories in that pot.

So, if that’s how I feel about a busted, perma-scorched, avocado-green pot with 2 broken handles and all the teflon scratched off, you can imagine my difficulty releasing people from my life. I love hard and deep. I’m like the puzzle box from the Hellraiser movies. It takes a while for me to let people in, but I never voluntarily let them out again.

Perfect Failure

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At least my braids always look great. 

It’s about 4 years since I started drawing webcomics, and if you scroll through 4 years of posts, you can really see the progression of my ability to force the Wacom tablet and Photoshop Elements to do my bidding, but it feels like there’s kind of a limit to all that, because all week I’ve been staring at the blank panels for a comic book that’s been causing contractions in my brain for the last year without finding the confidence to start over again with a totally different style.  At this point, it pretty much looks like the crutch of a digital drawing tablet has caused my drawing skills to actually degenerate.

On the other hand, I think the therapist in this comic looks like the same character in both panels, which was the thing that really stymied my comic creation prior to the tablet.

Anyway, I’ve had a lot of ideas along these lines. The blog isn’t going to look as great as it could, but like my friend the Coyote always says, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I need to unplug more regardless. I need to hold a pencil in my hand. I need to let go of the anguish I feel when I want to delete something or move something or just copy something. I’ve got to practice the basics if I want to feel worthy of comments like the one I received today from a woman who told me her dad drew for Mad Magazine and that I was the “real deal” just like him.

I’m not saying this is good, but it exists, which is more than I can say for last week’s comics.

Oh, hey! I drew a therapy comic that wasn’t about couples’ counseling. You’d think I’d had way more therapy than I’ve actually had based on the number of therapy comics I’ve drawn. I wasn’t even the person receiving therapy in the above comic.

We Have the Lowest Hanging Fruit

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My administration has the best solutions. You’ve never seen any solutions like we’re solving problems all the time, problems that we didn’t create ourselves. No, the Democrats did that when we weren’t looking. Sneaky! But I fixed it. Myself. Tremendous.

Political cartoons were killing me so I stopped but here we are again. Stupid stuff. Blaming the minority party for your unpopular decisions and then very slightly amending those terrible choices and patting yourself on the back for telling yourself not to do the thing you decided to do before you finally found one action so reprehensible that it offended the people who were totally cool with the misogyny and racism.

Still slouching toward the Third Reich, as it were. I’m scared. I’m scared all the time.

That’s a weird-looking bar. I’m tired.

Soy Big!

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You should have seen the one that got away.

Vegan fish. It’s not a thing. I mean, there are a lot of vegan meat replacement products—burgers, hot dogs, chicken, sausage, bacon, and I once even had a vegan duck substitute in a vegetarian Chinese restaurant—but I’ve never heard of a vegan alternative to fish.

I like fish. I hate zucchini, ever since the summer my mother grew 3 plants in her garden and no one told her that you’re supposed to pick them when they’re young and tender. Like many amateur gardeners, my mother let them grow to the size of baseball bats, amazed at the growth potential of one crop in a garden where you’d be lucky to coax a carrot to attain the width of a pencil. This resulted in a harvest of roughly 75 pounds of a vegetable that most kids wouldn’t enjoy an ounce of. And my mother never throws away food. She freezes it and reserves it and hides it in other things, so that I was gagging on secret zucchini in my pancakes for what felt like the rest of my childhood.

My mother denied this when I recently brought it up, but my father contradicted her protestations. He knows my mother is more than capable of the diabolical act of serving a picky 9-year-old zucchini pancakes and pretending they’re free of contamination. You weren’t fooling anyone, Mom.

 

It’s a Generational Thing

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And no, sexting doesn’t count. Your mother and I paid good money for that Gardasil vaccine.

You can’t tell kids to go outside and play anymore, because that’s, like, child abuse or something? I know too many kids who don’t know how to go outside and play; everything they know is on a screen, conceived of, directed by, and produced by other people. Maybe this is a minority opinion, but when I was 16 years old, if I was watching TV, using a computer, or playing a game, it was only because it was not possible at that moment for me to be making out in the backseat of a car. Granted the internet wasn’t as exciting or accessible in the early ’90s as it is now, but I still don’t think it’s better than sex. And you know I love the internet.

Any resemblance to actual teenagers, living or staring like undead zombies into a monitor in a small room with the curtains drawn tight to prevent the glare, is purely coincidental. I swear.

I drew that Ramones T-shirt and now I can’t get…”Sweet Disaster” by Dreamers out of my head. Weird world we live in. Gen X did not expect to live long enough to get sour about the next generation. Gen X didn’t expect any of this. Gen X would like to be sedated, but Gen X is too busy to take a break right now.