Author Archives: littledragonblue

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About littledragonblue

Dreamer, Writer, Artist, Lover

Stigma and Anthers

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Macrophotography of flowers on days equal parts scorching and windy in the high desert. Click here to embiggen.

One of the top shots from Sunday’s drive over Mount Graham. Been wanting to photograph this plant for a while: it’s the desert poppy, a showy white blossom that stands on a tall stalk and develops a thistle-like pod when the petals fall off. As I mentioned yesterday, they’re ubiquitous in the high desert, but I live in the low desert and only see them on road trips.

All day long I was thinking of various comics a person could draw about life, stuff about kids and summertime and introversion. Normal comic fodder. But my brain was on a short fuse all day, and just before dinner, when I went to get the mail and found we had received a single letter, from a medical facility threatening to send us to collections despite the fact that we made 3 separate attempts to pay the bill in the last 3 weeks and their billing department was apparently not competent enough to do something as complex as run a credit card or return a phone call, and my head basically exploded. I didn’t even make an effort after that; feeding the children took all my remaining willpower and I knew there was no chance of accomplishing anything else.

On the plus side, The Man fixed the problems I was having with the Wacom tablet/Photoshop for the last 3 months. I spend weeks with tech support working on the issue and never got anywhere close to figuring out the problem. The Man fixed it in 5 minutes. “Oh, CAD has that feature,” he said, once he understood the problem and considered possible solutions. He also fixed the scanner, which stopped working thanks to my implementing the aforementioned tech support’s unhelpful suggestions. So we’re back in business. If only the artist were competent to write and draw today.

The Fox invited me to a writing party tomorrow (yes, I know that’s a drawing party, but it’s a metaphor and the same basic concept). Maybe I can write and draw in the same day.

Hot Sun Rising Mandala

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Maybe it’s not the mandala that’s hot. Maybe it’s the state of Arizona. There is no way to tell the difference.

One thing’s for certain, and that is that it’s imperative to fix my scanner. Ever since I updated my OS, it doesn’t seem to like its own drivers that came with the device and were running fine before I started running Jackelope or Elephant-Bird, or whatever the heck they call this operating system. Puma. Adidas. No idea.

I got Comiconned out, or maybe I was just Phoenix-ed out. At any rate, I need to get out of the city and be someplace without other people, so The Man drove me the VERY long way home–as in, Phoenix is northeast of Tucson, but by the time we got to Tucson we were approaching it from the southwest. We turned a 2-hour drive into a 5-hour one, counting severals stops for me to tromp around the desert taking pictures of flowers and birds. Got some great shots, like this one of a red-tailed hawk leaping into the air. Finally had the macro lens and the elusive desert poppy in the same place at the same time, too. Well, the desert poppy actually isn’t elusive at all. It’s fairly ubiquitous in the spring and summer in certain parts of the state, but it tends to favor the high desert, and I tend to exist in the low desert, so this is the first time I’ve documented its fabulous insides. Will share soon.

I did have a good time at Comicon, but it was so huge and I didn’t have a good plan of attack and it was overwhelming. I met some really cool artists and writers, including the inimitable Phil Foglio (Girl Genius) along with Larry Welz (Cherry), along with some less famous dudes, most notably this guy Russ Kazmierczak, with whom I randomly got into a massive discussion about Alan Moore, the history of comics, and the deeper meaning of superheroes. He was so pleased with my conversation that he gave me his comic for free. He said it was because I saw graphic storytelling in the same way he did, and I’m going to believe that it was for that reason, and not because I was wearing a media badge.

ETA: WordPress just informed me that this is my 500th blog post at QWERTYvsDvorak. And all I got was this stupid virtual trophy. Plus a massive portfolio of ridiculous art.

If You Need to Stick Butterflies on Things

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Time for you to fly?

Yesterday’s comic had a positive reception, which is really all you can ask for. Today all I have is this sweet butterfly sticker, but who cares because we are going to Comicon! I got media passes for being a contributor to Panels.net, which means free media badges for me and my photographer’s assistant, aka The Man, and I got paid for the wedding shoot, which means, for the first time in my history of going to Comicon, I’m actually going to be able to buy comics.

Every year we say we’re going to cosplay but I never get it together. Mrs. Kitty thinks I should do Garnet from Steven Universe, which would be fun, but the character I’d most like to cosplay would be Agatha Heterodyne from Girl Genius. Alan Moore’s Promethea would also be a riot, but no one would know who I was. Or I could just be Poison Ivy like everyone else in the world. Except, no, I’ll just be wearing my Comic Book Legal Defense Funds T-shirts and probably skorts because this is Phoenix and it’s likely to be very hot and somewhat sticky.

As for the butterfly sticker, it is available in 4 sizes, from small to really rather large for a sticker, prices ranging between $2.40 and $14.00. You can check out the various options and acquire your own Blue Morpho Butterfly sticker (seriously, the extra large one is 14 inches across, pretty stunning) or some other product with the Blue Morpho Butterfly design, in my shop. I’m not sure why I haven’t sold more of these stickers; I’ve sold a ton of Blue Morpho Notecards. Anyone wanna show this sticker some love?

Return of the Helicopter Kids

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In case you’re wondering, the book in panel 1 is Fifty Shades of Gray. There is way better bdsm literature available to satisfy your prurient interest.

I wasn’t even going to draw a comic today, but then I wrote one by accident, and it seemed silly not to finish it. It’s fun to revisit certain ideas. Revenge of the Helicopter Kids from last year is still one of my favorite comics. Hopefully the sequel lives up to the original and stands the test of time. There are probably more of them in my head. But now my hand is all stiff and achy.

Banking fees are bull. I’m letting you hold all of my money, on which you are paying me basically no interest, something like .01%, but you’re loaning it out to other people–at 13%!–and then you’re going to slap me with a fee for automatic transfers to cover overdraft? You have the money. It’s right there. You’re not even doing anything; a computer is moving it. Why does that cost $13? Don’t even get me started on the number of times we’ve been assessed monthly fees just for having accounts. Accounts that we were told were free.

I don’t know about the drunk painting classes. I’ve never been to one, but I’m not much of a drinker and I don’t really care to paint the same thing as everyone else.

 

The Blink of an Eyelash

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If I were a character in a movie I would be very wary about opening this chamber.

I keep coming back to this image even though I’m not 100% happy with its clarity. I did sharpen it up a bit in Photoshop but there aren’t really any simple fixes. This is a flower I shot in San Francisco, but beyond that I know nothing about it, except that it looks like it’s full of eyelashes and I wish I knew how to get the entire thing more focused. There’s so much going on in this flower, but not all of it comes through in the photo.

(Click here for full sized, enlargeable version.)

It’s not perfect, but it’s still cool.

WordPress seems to be doing everything it can to prevent people from viewing my images at full size. It used to be that you could just click on them and get a version that could be viewed at high resolution in great detail. Then it changed so you had to right click and specifically tell it to open the image in a new tab. Then even the new tab seemed stuck at 680 pixels wide, but I could set the width to anything I wanted in the URL and then give that URL to people. But today, that trick failed and I just got “file not found.” For the full size version of an image I had uploaded 15 minutes earlier. And I know its exact size: 5184 pixels wide. But WordPress is just blithely pretending that I’m not being penalized for using too much bandwidth because people want to see full size versions. So I uploaded that one to imgur but it still doesn’t look like 5184 to me. Whatevs. What the hell do I know about art, right?

Delivered the wedding photos today; hope the brides think they’re worth the money they spend. The Man and I are exploring alternate income streams. Would be nice to get regular photo gigs, I think, even if having someone’s memories in your hands is a bit nerve-wracking. Two shoots a month would make a huge difference.

All the Colors of the Whine

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If you think that’s colorful, you should see all the purple prose I left out.

It’s weird how dialog is always full of swear words in my head. Like, it seems funnier when it contains f-bombs. But I edit them out anyway. If you depend on that kind of language for humor, you might start substituting shock for actually being funny. This is still cute when it’s rated G.

This comic was fun to draw. I had to go back and put little faces on all the natural wonders to anthropomorphize them. And then I had to write about it so I could use the word “anthropomorphize” in my blog.

Also, I really like the white test on a black background. I have an entire story I want to tell that way. Realizing that doing all the letters in all caps would increase readability.

Weird Wide Web Mandala

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Gonna be honest. It’s not my most coherent work.

Originally, we were planning to go camping over Memorial Day weekend, but then we realized we were invited to a wedding, and also that I was supposed to be the photographer for that wedding, so we did the wedding instead. I’ve heard some horror stories from the Vampire Bat about the trials and tribulations of being a wedding photographer, but the brides were pretty laid back about it, and the only one coming remotely close to freaking out about details was Mrs. Kitty, who was the wedding planner. It’s a little nerve-wracking, because wedding picture are a big deal to the people whose wedding it is and it would feel terrible to mess them up. And of course, my camera did jam a few times, probably due to the intense heat, so I was only able to get a single shot of their first kiss even though they were kissing for about 30 seconds. Plus, when I got home, the computer starting seizing up and I was terrified it was going to begin deleting photos (this has happened before) but after an hour of messing with it, things were set to rights. There were some pretty good shots. And I got paid. So all is well. Now I am eating leftover plantains (the wedding was potluck) and trying to think of a comic for tomorrow.

That was my third paying photography gig and people are starting to ask me if I am going to start a sideline business. On the one hand, money. On the other hand, every time you take a hobby you love and start exploiting your talent for money, you have one less hobby you love.

Communication

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Pretty sure that would be a hard limit for me. I don’t care how big your paws are.

The couple in a the marital counseling office is a pretty common comic theme. I wouldn’t call it cliche, because there are so many places you can go with it, but it is a trope, because two people who ostensibly love each other but still fail to communicate at the most basic level is such a common occurrence in real life that it’s natural comedy fodder. I was thinking about comedy fodder because tonight The Man and I attended a live improv performance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never done, even though I’ve seen a million standup comedians in a wide array of venues. To my eyes, it appears pretty universal that one half of a couple will state their ideas or feelings or desires and the other half of the couple will interpret that in a way wholly unlike what was intended.

I was also thinking about fairy tales, because I’m always thinking about fairy tales, and I wanted to do Little Red Riding Hood, even though every single one of my fairy tale comics bombed. They were funny to me. The one-panel comics are actually the hardest for me. My inclination is to pile words upon words. So I deliberately kept this one simple, and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shade things, which I never do, because it takes forever and always looks terrible. This time it only took sort of long and only looks kind of bad, so that’s an improvement. Usually I erase the entire layer. The nightgown and the pillow came out OK.

My favorite version of Little Red Riding Hood, is the very, very old one where the wolf kills grandma, and forced Red to eat her meat and drink her blood, which is arguably, more twisted than what’s going on here. But I also like the sexual aspect of the story about a girl who goes into the woods and comes out, if she makes it out, a woman.

Actually, I think the real theme of this comic was inspired ny something I wrote yesterday in a comments forum. Someone wrote a letter to Dear Abby  a couple days back, about her mother wandering around her house at night, putting her ear to the married adult daughter’s door. The daughter had stopped sleeping with her husband because she was terrified of her mother hearing their conjugal relations taking place, but she hadn’t told her husband that was why she was shutting him down. A lot of commenters didn’t really understand that course of action, myself included. I wrote that if I thought my mother was deliberately listening at my door to catch my husband and me in action, I would make more noise. “Oh,” someone commented, “to show her how great it is?”

And I said, no, it was to be respectful, because if someone if straining to hear you, the polite thing to do is to speak louder.

Of course, in this comic, we don’t know that Grandma’s participation is consensual. Fortunately, it’s only a comic, and no fairy tale characters were traumatized in the making of it.

 

Axillary Buds

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Garlic: an allium for all seasons. (Click here for full size version.)

This particular batch of Costco garlic just seemed most photogenic. There was one with brilliant red stripes, and some with particularly twisted scapes, and ones where the skin remained like a protective bubble after all the cloves had been plucked, so I took them to their very own macro photo shoot in and impromptu photo studio made of black construction paper and a lamp and was medium-pleased with the results. This is my favorite one of the batch, although it was hard to choose a favorite from such disparate details.

Axillary buds seems like a funny name to me, probably because the axillary part on a human is the armpit, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you’d call the thing we’re looking at here. I also think they look like pumpkin seeds.

Speaking of things that look like other things, the next day I pulled another set of images off my camera, and when the app that does that opened, it flashed all the thumbnails of my last gallery and I was like, “Whoa, who put all this hardcore porn on my computer?” But really, it was just the thumbnails of the garlic. Full size you can see it’s a blurry picture of a plant. but a fast glance at a small image makes it seem like something less appropriate for general consumption.

There are a couple more I might upload later. There’s still some writing to be done tonight.

Malala Yousafzai and Love of Learning

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We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow. ~Malala Yousafzai

Considering my final message of the school year, I really wanted to do something that spoke to the ideas of unity and acceptance and love, concepts that seem widely absent from the world this year, and decided to choose a quote from Malala Yousafzai, the education rights activist. If you don’t know about the amazing life of Malala, you should check her out. In a nutshell, she was an 11-year-old girl living under the Taliban when she was asked to blog about her experience as a schoolgirl in a country where education for girls was outlawed, and she began to speak in favor of education and against the regime. Four years later, the Taliban shot her in the head to shut her up, but she survived, and kept at what she had been doing, and went on to win a Nobel Peace prize and some other things too. She graduated high school and went on to open her own school. I don’t think she’s yet turned 20.

It seems like a lot of the problems in our country are predicated by a lack of comprehensive education, a sort of selective myopia about what education means, and what’s important, which is why I chose this quote. You can’t make informed decisions if your schooling has massive lacunae. You need science and literature to understand your world, and you need a good overview of science and literature. You can’t for example, teach science and literature but deliberately leave out the workings of evolution and stories about sex  and claim that you know the shape of the world.

If you must zealously guard your deficits in case something that clashes with your beliefs slips through, then your beliefs are probably not as not as strong as you think they are. Learn about the things that scare you and then evaluate whether or not they’re useful (and why they’re frightening). And that means actually learn. Don’t just be like some people and sit in the classroom with your fingers in your ears, or demanding the teacher reconcile observable phenomena with your preconceived notions. That’s not learning. Science means you look at the quantitative data, not just the parts that validate your story. Literature means you look at the entire human experience, not just the parts that are pretty and clean.

Technically, and from an artistic perspective, this is one of my less ambitious bulletin boards, but I think the kids will enjoy it. Those are real strings on the balloons, and they move when the wind blows. Someone will probably pull them off. Oh well. It took 4 days total, although the first day I just put up the background because I was busy. Then it took a couple hours to make and paste the letters, a couple hours to make the rainbow and the books, and a couple hours to finish and hang everything. The Girl was there to help me, because her school got out a week before mine, and she helpfully pointed out, 3/4 of the way through the rainbow, that I had arranged the colors backward, probably because I haven’t had a good night sleep in weeks. Then she said that it was OK, because the rainbow was unique, like Malala.

So tired.