Category Archives: Clothing

The Future Is Non Binary in the Wild

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You must provide your own attitude. Come on, you can do it. 

Here’s the world famous Ms. Kitty modeling my “The Future Is Non Binary and Intersectional” shirt at the world famous Tucson Bartending Academy, where I presume she is about to earn a degree in mixology. It really looks like a bar, but it turns out all those bottles are full of water and food coloring. The fruit is all plastic. She mixed me about 25 drinks in an hour but I left feeling very thirsty.

Anyway, this shirt! It looks good. You have to get it in black. The tiny spaceship is adorable. Also available as a sticker, a travel mug, a wall clock, a notebook, and much much more. Check out this design in my RedBubble shop.

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.

Ermine (the Weasel in Winter)

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Look into his shiny black eyes and try to say no.

There were a couple details from “American Salvage” that seemed especially striking, and this ermine definitely topped the list. So cute! In the story, the white-furred ermine has been scarce in Kalamazoo, Michigan, having been long over hunted due to the value of their gorgeous pelts, which probably look way better on their original owners than any subsequent possessors of said coats. They are returning to the area of the salvage yard due to it being neglected for so long, but soon enough they will pave the place over to build more suburbs, and what will become of the poor weasel then?

At any rate, I’ve spiffed up his lines and memorialized the elusive ermine in my RedBubble shop. You can support the artist and can get Ermine on a T-shirt, sticker, and a variety of other fine products.

Adult Tutu in Blue, Purple, and Teal

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Not available in stores. You cannot order yours today.

Not being one of those people who ferociously guards their costuming secrets, I present here my first-ever handmade tutu, size adult medium, in blue, purple, and teal, what the Fox refers to as “dragon colors.” Although actually, maybe he means “Dragon colors,” as in my colors, since dragons come in every color, while I personally own a pair of shoes, and a several dresses, and some other garments that match this tutu. Also, a dragon tattoo.

This project is incredibly easy; it took maybe 5 or 6 hours. It required:

  • 1 yard of a stretchy, crocheted-type elastic band (something with decent sized holes in its pattern)
  • 6 yards of tulle
  • a small amount of thread
  • scissors
  • yardstick
  • needle

You could probably dispense with the needle and thread if you secured the waist with safety pins or just tie it together with the tulle. The elastic was the most expensive part at $4 a yard. The tulle was $4.50 for 6 yards, so the whole thing comes in under $10.

Basically, you measure your holey elastic to the part of your torso where you want it to hang (I chose just above my hips) and then create a circle of elastic with that circumference by sewing the two ends together. Then you cut the tulle into 18″ x 4″ strips. One by one, take your tulle strips and thread them through 2 juxtaposed loops in the elastic, with each end an equal length sticking. Then tie a simple half knot in the tulle, so you end up with a pair of 9″ strips sticking out of one loop in the elastic. Then repeat approximately 215 times.

Possibly with stiffer tulle or a smaller waistband, your might need fewer knots. If you’re making the kind of tutu where the tulle is long and hangs down, you probably need much less tulle. What I read online suggested that this project required 3 yards of tulle, but it definitely wasn’t fluffy enough until I got through the whole 6 yards.

Next week, we’re invited to a cosplay wedding, and also I’m the photographer. So I was wracking my brains trying to think of a good cosplay. Like people have suggested I should do Garnet from Stephen Universe, but not only is that a complicated costume, it seems pretty impractical to wear a giant visor while working as a wedding photographer. My go-to dress-ups are either Pippi Longstocking or Little Red Riding Hood, but the problem with Pippi is that you end up fussing with your hair all night to keep it on the wires that help it stick out from your head, and at this point my hair goes all the way down to my back, so getting the hair to stick out right in the first place would be a pain. As for Red, the riding hood seemed likely to get in the way of taking pictures, not to mention that it’s the bodice that makes the outfit really pop, but again, you can’t have a costume that restricts your movement/breathing while you work. Unless you work at a Ren Faire or something.

So, I mentioned this problem to the Vampire Bat, who frequently works as a professional photographer while in ornate costumes, and she was like: duh, slap some butterflies on your regular clothes and you’re already Delirium from The Sandman. Duh. Literally. I have the leather jacket, the combat boots, the fishnet shirt, the red hair, and a wide variety of outlandish stockings: colored, striped, fishnet. Now I just need to figure out how to make a bunch of fish float around my head. The sad thing is that I actually own a remote-controlled mylar fish balloon, but that would be another thing that would impede my ability to take pictures. No, the really sad thing is that I won’t be able to make it to Tucson Comicon this year because I got my media request in too late and also because I already have 3 parties to go to that weekend. Maybe I can just sneak in Friday night, which is the only free time I’ll have that weekend anyway.

I can still take this costume to at least 3 other events besides the wedding this year alone, and now I don’t have to steal the Girl’s tutu, which is more than 6 years old and has stretched-out elastic, ever again. Plus, you know, sometimes I just dress like this for fun, and this tutu matches more of my clothing than her pinky-pinky one.

So: some kind of hair piece that makes it look like fish are floating around my head, and then convince The Man to grow his beard and hair out a little, wear a peasant shirt, and carry a bindlestiff. He’s not much for cosplay, but if I can get the shirt, I can probably persuade him about the bindlestiff. With the addition of a loving but unwilling Destruction towering over me, my Delirium costume is complete.

It’s OK If You Don’t Get Me

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Just keeping it weird here.

This is the latest T-shirt design. I know it’s completely weird and unsellable, but literally my entire M.O. is to just do the thing that my muse tells me do, regardless of how ridiculous it seems. Then, later on, I wonder what the heck I was thinking, but some percentage of the time it works out for the best. The poet Syd Lea once told me that I should keep doing whatever felt right to me regardless of what anyone else said. He said, “Be stubborn, woman.”

Not that I needed that advice. Maybe he figured I was just going to do that anyway.

The original version of this design was the last panel of the first BJC comic, about how sometimes your own mother doesn’t understand you so you can’t expect much from the rest of the world. Even in context, it’s bizarre. The benefit of this sort of extremely niche design is that if anyone else does appreciate it, you know you truly have commonalities at the core.

If you’d like to purchase this bizarre comic panel on a variety of clothing, paper products, and household items, you can obtain It’s OK If You Don’t Understand Me in my RedBubble shop.

Tomorrow I guess I’ll go back to drawing longer comics. Maybe.

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?

My Most Popular Sticker Ever

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Johnny the Australian Shepherd Paddleboards Roosevelt Lake, October 2014

Why is “Johnny the Australian Shepherd Paddleboards Roosevelt Lake, October 2014” my most popular sticker design? I literally have no idea. I don’t know why anyone does anything on the Internet. I don’t understand why I keep selling stickers of this dog that doesn’t even have a fandom but nobody wants to buy Princess Sealestia, Ruler of Aquastria merchandise. I mean, it was a cool dog, and his best friend, Mr. Macho Bush Pilot, is not difficult to look at, but really? If anything was going to sell stickers, you’d think it would be the fabulous Blue Morpho Butterfly. Nope, people want notecards of that. And nobody, but NOBODY wants “Vanity Has a Thousand Eyes” even though that thing took me like 3 months to finish and is absolutely the most complicated digital paint thing I’ve ever done.

If I knew then what I know know (i.e., how to use more features Photoshop) I guess I would have made the dude’s muscles a little less ropy and pronounced. Or maybe he really looked like that. Who remembers?

Johnny the Australian Shepherd it is. These stickers are available in 3 sizes: 4″x2.2″, 5.5″x3″, and 8.5″x4.7″. Prices range from $2.32 for the small ones to $5.66 for the medium ones and $9.80 for the big ones. It all seems totally random. I also sell this design on a huge range of clothing, bags, cups, prints, and other completely random things that you can have your designs printed on. But if you want it, you’ll no doubt want it on a sticker. It’s $2.32 of pure sporting canine goodness.

Be Like Allison

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You can’t buy happiness. But you could buy a T-shirt from my RedBubble shop, which would definitely make me happy, and probably make you happy.

This is Allison. Allison is a successful writer and professional performer of death defying feats. Allison is very happy. Why do you think Allison is so happy? Is it because she is wearing this kickass QWERTYvsDvorak T-shirt? Correlation may not prove causality, but there does seem to be abundant evidence that wearing a QvD T-shirt can make you, and the people around you, at least 20% happier.

Allison is modeling “Embrace Me to the End.” If you click the link, you could, too.

This has always been one of my favorite designs in the shop, even though a marine biologist once chastised me for drawing a blue whale, rather than a sperm whale, which is more commonly thought of as the giant squid’s natural enemy. The way I see it, we don’t know everything that goes on under the ocean. Who’s to say that there isn’t a kraken sized squid that periodically tries to munch on the largest animal on the planet at the deepest, darkest depths of the world? I like both cephalopods and cetaceans. The bigger the creature, the more love there is to go around.

There are also some other interesting things in my shop if you click around.

I procrastinated and didn’t draw a comic and there’s still one other important thing to do before bed tonight. It’s sort of related to the fact that 3 years ago, The Man and I got legally married by the law of the land. We’d already been together for 4 1/2 years before that, and we were, as we said, “gay married” for a couple of years before the wedding, Tucson being a city that offers domestic partnerships, and the University of Arizona being an employer that offers benefits for domestic partners. I wonder if the marriage supersedes the partnership?

Anyway, 3 years ago today I became a married Dragon, and The Man became a married The Man, and we were bound to each other for better or for worse. Love that guy.

 

Koala-T!

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I don’t see why we wouldn’t win. We meet all the koalifications.

The Man works for an aerospace manufacturing firm, in quality assurance. It’s a job, you know? Every year, the company holds a big picnic in the park, with a bouncing castle and water guns and games for the little kids. Hot dogs and hamburgers provided by the company, potluck for everything else, water balloons, temporary tattoos, that sort of thing. Very America. Much wholesome. In advance of the picnic, they print a commemorative shirt, designed by an employee. Whoever wins the design contest gets a little bonus, maybe $100.

So The Man had this idea, putting the koala in quality. The words are his, and the idea for the picture is his, but he doesn’t have the patience for drawing. He mentioned this concept about 6 months ago, and I said I could probably do it (I’m much better at Photoshop and the Wacom tablet than I was last year!) but we didn’t follow through. Yesterday, he mentioned that the design was due next week, so I did a little sketch. Today he mentioned that it was actually due tomorrow. That was fine, since I had the sketch and no comic anyway.

This is what I did today. I started by looking at how other cartoonists would depict the body of a koala giving a thumbs up. The Man was very clear that the koala must be giving a thumbs up. I was surprised to find that this is, apparently, a common theme, and there were many thumbs up koalas from which to choose. Then I looked at photographs of actual koalas, because most people who draw cartoon animals don’t seem to have ever seen that actual animal, and I like some degree of verisimilitude in my comics. Once I got the eyes, nose, and mouth satisfactorily blocked out and positioned, I just started grabbing colors from actual koala photos, and drawing tiny dots and lines to represent fur. Then I used the blur tool to floofify QA Koala. Somewhere along the line I noted that koalas do not, in fact, have tails and deleted the vestigial one that had appeared in my original reference image. You can’t trust cartoonists. Not about animal anatomy.

The Man was happy with the design but wanted it a bit darker, so I added a layer, grabbed a dark gray, set the opacity to 20%, covered the koala with this shade, and then cleaned up the edges. The Man came in again as I was finishing up the outline and said he could see that I was doing something, but he couldn’t tell what. “I’m making him floofier,” says I. The blur tool is great for cartoon fur.

I used fonts for the lettering instead of doing it by hand. The original version has the company name and “2016 company picnic” written at the top, but I took that out for this blog.

Whether or not we win (“When we win,” The Man said, assuming that no one else was going to top this) I’ll fix this design up a bit more and offer it on my website. Someone, somewhere, wants a Koala-T.

The Thanksgiving Machine

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Only in America could we transform a celebration of gratitude for not starving to death into a celebration of Dionysian excess ushering in a month-long period of accelerated capitalism.

On my own, I tend to eat reasonable portions of healthy food, but put me into a situation where everyone is overeating–in a restaurant or a food-centric holiday like Thanksgiving–and it’s like someone else is moving that fork from the plate to my mouth. And then getting up for seconds. And thirds. And dessert. And seconds on dessert.

This comic is actually a rerun from last year (cf the copyright date), but it bears repeating. There are people like the Fox with a high tolerance for the effects of gluttony, but the older I get, the more uneasy they make me. So much conspicuous consumption. And the older I get, the more I tend to participate in it.

I’m not as bad as the Bear, though. he despises Christmas and Valentine’s Day and pretty much any type of popular celebration, but his business is mostly gift-based and he sells most of his art between Thanksgiving day and until whenever he stops taking orders because he can’t guarantee that things will be made/shipped by Christmas.

All of which leads me into the real point, which is that I had intended to work up a great ad campaign to launch Wednesday, and fund it and everything, but I was sick for most of October and everything fell to the wayside. Now the holiday week is here, none of the photos I took for tomorrow’s page came out right, and my family has begun to arrive.

So listen: if you’re reading this, if you are a quirky person, or a person who buys gifts for quirky people, consider purchasing a holiday present from my online store. In addition to Dragon merchandise, I offer a number of lovely and whimsical designs on a wide variety of products: Tshirts, hoodies, skirts, leggings, blank books, travel mugs, prints, electronic cases. There are a lot of designs on a lot of products, and if you see a design you like and it’s not on the product you want, let me know, and I’ll get it up for you. RedBubble offers a lot of sales, so if you look at the top of the page, you’ll often find a coupon code.

Not sure where to begin?

For the artist and lover of beautiful things, there’s the “Perfect Passion Flower” studio pouch, just right for carrying pencils, pens, and other small supplies.

Cat lovers seem to enjoy “Kitty Sees Three Fishes,” available here on a greeting card, a perfect accompaniment to any feline-themed gift. Hypoallergenic. Does not shed. No animals were harmed in the painting of this picture.

Feeling dangerous? The “Punk Rock Raven” pillow is soft and hard, all at the same time, for when you want to decorate with a little edge. (If you’re buying RedBubble pillows, keep in mind that the print is on a pillowcase, which can be purchased with or without a pillow, so you need to double check what you’re buying or you could end up either with a pillow you don’t want, or with an empty pillowcase on Christmas Day.)

If you’re more of a dog-person and less into commitment, “Johnny the Australian Shepherd Paddleboards Roosevelt Lake, October 2014,” on a sticker livens up any unornamented surface on which you have permission to stick funny dog paintings. Johnny is a real dog, and this painting is based off a photograph I took of this dog actually paddleboarding. Your outdoorsy dog-loving friends will appreciate it.

Finally, kids who love ponies love My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and kids who love MLP:FiM and have a good sense of humor love the Princess Sealestia, Ruler of Aquastria Tshirt. If your bronies are too big for kids’ clothes, you can get this in adult sizes, too.

If you don’t want any of these items, but you still want to support a starving artist, please consider clicking “favorite” on any of my RedBubble designs, sending links to people who might like to buy them, or scrolling back through this website and repost any comics that amuse you. My traffic has increased 10x this year, and if I can increase it 10x more in 2016, I’ll have reached my goals. Every little bit helps.