His Song Went on Forever

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I’m not that deep. I’ll never be that deep. But I can see into the depths. 

I don’t usually do stuff like this, not being one for idols, but David Bowie was such an phenomenal creative spirit that it’s hard to imagine the hearing, seeing human being who wouldn’t be inspired by his work. He was a true artist in every sense of the word, a man who wrote what still stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest commentaries ever created on love, aliens, and rock and roll (let alone one of the greatest albums of all time) when he was 24 year old, and then, rather of resting on his laurels, invented himself again and again, for every album, for every movie role.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars played in the background as I drew this comic, and while I’ve listened to this album start to finish literally hundreds of times in my life, I kept hearing new ideas, new notes. It kept offering new inspiration.

I can’t even talk about “Lazarus” right now.

If you notice that I have chosen the silhouette of Jareth, the Goblin King to represent the dozens of faces that Bowie wore in his career, it is because I am 9 years old, and because when we fall in love, we always remember the moment, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love The Hunger or The Man Who Fell to Earth, brutal and adult as both those films were.  

This is sort of what I feel about any really great artist finishing their work here: it’s sad they had to go when they did, but it’s wonderful that they got to stay as long as they could. The world is a better place for the existence of people like David Bowie and Robin Williams, and I’m a better artist for having walked in their light.

Dotty Mandala and Macrophotography

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It’s a bit spotty, isn’t it?

That was another breakneck weekend. And now it’s over.

This mandala is stark and cold, like the snow icing the mountains, making the desert look like Denver. It being somewhat threadbare, here is some macrophotography to fill in any gaps the white space may have left in your visual pleasure receptors.

Humans have visual pleasure receptors, right? Feast your eyes on this:

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What else are you missing?

This is the bud of an aloe flower. Tiny and pretty!

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Twisty!

This is a detail of a small garden sculpture my mother bought me at a street fair. It happens to be the curly hair of a little fairy, a very specific fairy, in fact: the first year dance fairy. You can tell by how she holds her feet. It’s a long story. But a small detail.

There ya go. Happy Monday.

Making Mistakes: A New Year’s Bulletin Board

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It’s not perfect, but I learn as I go.

For the first bulletin board of 2016, I knew there would be flowers. The quote came afterward. Monday, I went in just to get the background up, and it took all of Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon to finish the project.

Originally I planned to make an assortment of very different 3-dimensional flowers, but I started with the big one, and it ended up taking me almost 3 hours and it didn’t even look exactly how I wanted it (it would be better with twice as many petals) so I ended up experimenting with another method of getting a (smaller) flower with many petals and some dimensionality, and then, at the very end, I threw on a bunch of simpler (but still complicated) really small ones in the same color scheme.

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You can really see the dimensionality.

For the quote I was thinking of Anaïs Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” But then it seemed like Nin could possibly be a little racy for an elementary school if some impressionable young person decided to look her up. Or if some grownup decided she was inappropriate. It’s really an outside possibility but people can be pretty touchy about literature, and she’s strongly associated with erotica, so I decided to err on the side of caution and go with Gaiman. We have 2 of his books in the library: Coraline and The Graveyard Book. I edited the quote just a bit for length. It’s still so long that there was no  time to cut out the letters.

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You can tell where my hand got tired at the end. 

Compatibility

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We just come from such different backgrounds. We belong in such different worlds. And we’re just made of such different materials.

And this concludes our inadvertent shark week triumvirate. I think. I can’t promise no more shark comics, but I don’t intend to make any more. I didn’t intend to make this many, though. Shark comics just happened. You know how it is. Someone gives you an idea about sharks, which makes you think about sharks, so then you make a polymer clay shark, meaning you have to create some kind of polymer clay shark themed art even though you’ve already done some digital shark art, after which then you remember that you also have a Lego shark, and wouldn’t it be funny if the two sharks met, and what would they say to each other, keeping in mind that the last time we saw our little polymer clay shark, he was pumping himself up and thinking about mating.

I never had Legos as a kid; my parents rejected any toy that inspired us to keep asking for more of the same toy, and obviously, you can never have enough Legos. To wit: I received the shark as a gift from a guy I dated in college, who had 20,000 of them. That’s not hyperbole. He counted them. And he brought them to college in a foot locker. Periodically he would let other people play with them, but mostly he just built increasingly elaborate castles in the dorm room we shared, none of which were ever finished because he always ran out of Legos. He was good though. He could have been one of those professional Lego artists.

Since he had multiples, the Lego shark lived in our fish tank for a year or so. When we got rid of the fish I cleaned the calcium off it and it was good as new, but I never had any other Legos to stick it on until last month, when The Man received the Google Fi holiday package, which contained a quantity of Legos and instructions for using them to build a shrine to your cell phone.

They were calling it a “phone holder,” but we built it, and I promise you it was a shrine. An altar. A monstrance, if you will.

The other side of the page offers instructions for building a “cable tidy.” We did not build the cable tidy. We may worship our phones, but I promise you, we never organize our cables.

Shark Affirmations

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I may have no idea what I look like, but I promise you I *smell* amazing.

It’s not that I have any particular affinity for or interest in sharks, beyond a general interest in nature and marine creatures. It’s just that Monday, while thinking about puns for Tuesday’s Sharkcuterie comic, the Girl asked to do some polymer clay modeling, and when she wanted to know what I was going to make, I just said, “a shark,” because that’s what was on my mind.

I also made a watermelon (not pictured here).

So while sitting here, feeling tired and uninspired (already spent a couple hours making something else today that I wasn’t able to finish) I was toying with the idea of just featuring the clay shark. But just the shark alone isn’t all that much to look at, and I’m more into the short narrative than the visual showcase, so it seemed like the shark better have something to say. Then I thought about the Dragon Affirmations comic and then I wondered what affirmations a shark would make. Then I set up the shoot and observed that the shark would have the same problem with mirrors that Dragon does, namely that it’s difficult to see directly in front of your face when your eyes are on either side of your head.

Poor shark.

In researching funny words associated with sharks, I came across the term “hypercarnivore,” which refers to creatures whose diets are at least 70% meat. Most sharks are hypercarnivores, although, in researching yesterday’s comic, I learned that at least one shark has been observed following a vegan diet.

Poor shark.

At the Sharkcuterie

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This may be the most abstruse, esoteric comic I’ve ever posted here. Who even knows what charcuterie is? Personally, I refuse to eat any type of processed meat. Sausage, cold cuts, anything that gets ground up and smushed back together is not OK with me, and nitrates/nitrites tend to give me a migraine. If I am going to eat meat, I prefer it to look like the actual animal, or at least be the largest possible chunk of that animal, and I would rather get it fresh and cook it myself so I know exactly what’s in it. After 20 years of vegetarianism, it’s hard not to be picky about eating animals.

Besides, do you know what’s in processed meat? No, you do not. Nobody does, not 100%. Not even the garde manger chef who made it. Anything could be in there. Karen Cushman nailed it when she wrote, “sausages are where butchers hide their mistakes,” even though she meant it as an example of snobbery. If not wanting to eat this makes me a snob, so be it.

The original gag is not mine. My brother, probably the only person in the world whose ideas I actually use, sent me an email saying he thought the idea of a “sharkcuterie” would make a funny T-shirt, but he had no idea of what a sharkcuterie would be. And then I spent literally an entire day thinking of puns for stuff that sharks would buy in a preserved meat market. Some of the rejects: mako bacon, porpoisemeat/toroisemeat (I was trying to make a pun on “forcemeat,” the very idea of which sends waves of nausea rippling through my gut, but neither of them really work), and some kind of joke about scotoplanes, which are also called sea pigs. But seriously, who knows that? I had to look all of this up, and it bummed me out that I couldn’t think of anything for terrine, galantine, or confit. Clam chops is funny, even though lamb chops aren’t really charcuterie because they’re not preserved. Poetic license. Or, comic license, I guess. In addition, I also considered making the sausages hanging on the wall look like eels, sea urchins, and anemones.

Anyway, those are some goofy looking sharks. They both need orthodontists.

Also: head cheese. Ew.

New Year, New Boob Mandala

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Breast cancer turned my friend into a comedian. “Last year, my boob tried to kill me,” she says, “so I killed it first.” Then she makes a kind of ninja sword slicing sound–“Wah-CHAA!”– while whipping her hands around and everyone laughs. Because the alternative is worse.

I seem to average about 2 friends surviving breast cancer a year. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t beaten it yet, but it’s a rough year and people keep doing battle with the monster. This mandala was actually drawn in honor of my mother-in-law’s victory, which was several years ago, but I probably know 10 people who’ve dealt with it since then.

It’s a good thing a strong mandala came up today, because I don’t feel wholly prepared to start up another year of webcomics and art blogging. This is because I had what I think of as a “mom vacation,” which means that everyone around me is on vacation and my workload actually doubles because everyone’s around all the time and everyone needs things from me and by the end of the day I’m too intellectually worn out to actually create anything, which then enervates me even more. So, since I can’t afford to go away for a couple days by myself and sit in absolute silence without taking care of other people, my “vacation” will actually be going back to business as usual.

Maybe I’ll draw a comic about it. Or maybe I’ll use the ridiculous gag my brother sent me yesterday, because who doesn’t like lame, esoteric puns?

I’ve also got a New Year’s bulletin board to hang. And about ten thousand other things to do.

So it’s even odds as to whether tomorrow you’ll get a comic or some macro photography. It’s such a massive surprise even I don’t know.

 

 

 

Happy New Year!

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Dragon and Marzipan Bird wish you well from their winter wonderland.

QWERTYvsDvorak is going on vacation. Or staycation. Whatever you call it when you don’t update the website until January 3rd because things happen too quickly at the end of the year and you really need to take some time off. That’s where QWERTYvsDvorak is going. But before I go, I’d like to say how grateful I am for the people who’ve been reading, upvoting, and sharing my blog posts. Like my whole freaking life I’ve been sharing original stuff with the world and finally someone who isn’t my father thinks that’s it’s worth looking at.

I’m not much of a Christmas person, but I do believe in the totally arbitrary celebration of the new year, the reviewing of the past year, and the setting of expectations for the year to come.

In short, things can only get better.

Happy New Year!

Dragon Comics 124

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Money, religion, politics. Just keep your mouth shut. 

Thus concludes the tale of the dragon and the troll, a complete journey from innocence, to experience, to rage, to remorse, to empathy, to remembering what caused the rage in the first place. It’s important to engage in meaningful with individual who hold a variety of beliefs, but it’s also important to do so with respect and, when needed, restraint. A little empathy helps. We need to be able to talk to each other rationally, no matter how much we disagree.

Otherwise, it’s best to walk away.

But it’s better if we can talk.

Peace on Earth. Good will to everyone. And if you can’t manage that, if you can only communicate your point through insults and puerile behavior, maybe your point isn’t as firm as you believe.

The Season of Lights

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Luminarias show the way on the darkest of nights. 

I fully intended to draw a comic today. I fully intended to do a lot of things. But none of those things happened. Other things happened instead, but very few of them were intentional or productive. The season of very little natural light does funny things to my brain.

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The fountain in the cactus garden under red and gold lights

The biggest bump to this day was the publication of my article about Travis Hanson, who draws awesome dragons and other things like that, sometimes with magical tales to go along with them. I urge you to check it out if you’re the least bit interested in that sort of artwork and storytelling.

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Do you know why this tree is blue? Maybe it hates winter as much as I do.

In lieu of something hilarious, please accept these photographs from a luminaria event at the botanic garden down the street. It’s a fun evening of lights and music, and even though I’ve lived here for 6 winters and have had a garden membership for a lot of that time, I never attended before, in part because it cost money and in part because I don’t tend to do a lot of Christmasy things. But in this case, I got in free, because The Man’s band was among the many musical acts of the evening. Since it’s a klezmer band, it wasn’t too Christmasy, either.