We are all connected

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My blue period lasted until I was 35. Now I'm in my rainbow period.

My blue period lasted until I was 35. Now I’m in my rainbow period.

Here’s a few more sketchy flights of fancy from my Trickster’s Hat days. There’s something so soft about pencil drawings, and especially velvety about color pencil. When I was a teenager I used to spend a lot of babysitting money on artist quality colored pencils, but I think this drawing was done with school supplies. I used to covet colored pencil–any arts supplies–so badly. Now I have dozens of sets of colored pencils, and I spent most of my time on the tablet.

Don't mess with Little Red

Don’t mess with Little Red

Little Red Riding Hood again, this time a dark, brooding raven of a riding hood. Here’s one little girl who’s not afraid to walk through the forest. She’s more than a match for this brutally psychedelic world.

OK, back to the passion flower! When that’s finished, I may take a break from the tablet and get back to basics.

Dragon Comics 106

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Because there's a word for that, when you judge someone on the basis of their color...

Because there’s a word for that, when you judge someone on the basis of their color…

Happy Friday! Here’s your friendly neighborhood webcomic. No others news to report. Still working on my passion flower design, which should be ready next week. The desert is hot, the pool is the perfect temperature, and if you want to take a walk, you’d best wait until the sun goes down, and even then you’ll be sweating puddles in your boots. Delicious.

Zentanglement

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All Sharpies, all the time: black, red, silver.

All Sharpies, all the time: black, red, silver.

I’ve seen some people call this kind of free form, stream of consciousness, space filling doodle a Zen Tangle, but I was doing them for decades before I realized that people outside my family drew like this. My mom doodled constantly on the backs of envelopes and the edges of calendars, in a style similar to this. Typically, it’s an absent-minded thing: I would mostly do it on the edge of school papers and the margins of notebooks. Supposedly it’s a soothing, centering thing, like a mandala, but without the rigidity and focus.

This one I did in a single sitting. It took an hour, and it seems kind of threadbare to me, but it was definitely helpful in terms of getting my head out of video mode and into art mode. Usually, when I’m just doing it absent mindedly, a lot more ink gets on the page.

If there’s a pen in my hand, I want to use it, even if I’m just drawing hearts or writing the alphabet over and over. It feels good to draw

Further adventures in line drawing

Two more examples: on the left, black and silver Sharpies; on the right, the back of a save the date card from our wedding.

If you can’t make something representative, at least you can make something.

I’m working on a new T-shirt design, which should be pretty stunning when it’s done. When I started I said, “Hey, you can pull this off in a night.” After 3 days of drawing, I’m about halfway done. It will be a digital painting of a passion flower, which is an astonishingly bizarre sight, and more so because they only bloom a couple days out of the year. So that will be exciting. It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded a new design.

Yesterday, by the way, I sold 2 giralicorn pillows. They look like this:

This is what a giralicorn throw pillow looks like.

This is what a giralicorn throw pillow looks like.

I wish I could meet the customer who made this purchase. I imagine the person who wants to decorate their home with not one, but 2 of these creations, is probably a fairly interesting individual. Perhaps even more interesting than I am, because I drew this picture, but don’t see any way in which an item like this would fit in with my home decor.

Just Like Honey from the Bee Mandala

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Just like honey, from the bee

Candy drops and sweet emotion 

Monday was a good day! My article about Jews in comics got a good reception, and mercury got up over 102, which means a couple things: my fingers and toes and nose didn’t get frozen even when The Man blasted the cooler, zero traffic picking the kids up from the first day of camp (people flee this city when it gets hot), and the pool finally reached 80 degrees! Hooray. Now I have a compelling reason to get my butt off this couch. I will be conducting all further business from within the confines of my swimming pool.

People sometimes ask how to survive in the desert in the summer. This is how to survive in the desert in the summer. Also, we have an ice maker.

One thing I spend a lot of time doing in the pool is rescuing bees from drowning. I guess when we’re not in it it’s flat enough that they don’t break the surface tension, but the kids and I must have pulled 15 bees out of the water in 30 minutes. Well, I pulled most of them and the Boy got a couple. The Girl is still timid, even though she’s seen me do it a thousand times. Seriously, the last thing a drowning bee is thinking of is stinging you.

You can observe them very minutely when they’re all wet and out of sorts. They shake their wings vigorously, too fast for the human eye to see, and use their front legs to brush the water off their midsection. They even brush off their long tongues. If they’re still wet, they lean onto their front legs and use their back legs to dry themselves. The longer they’ve been in the water, the more time they take to combobulate themselves.

This mandala reminds me of butterscotch and toffee and caramel: all the mostly-sugar candies, and also, of course, honey.

Fear and Loathing on the Internet

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Eddy when he said he didn't like his teddy...

Eddy when he said he didn’t like his teddy…

When we were in grad school, the Rabbit used to draw little comics, which she sometimes stuck on my office door. I still, somewhere, have a rather dark one (which probably in part inspired this comic) with a little teddy bear and a big teddy bear, and the big teddy has spaced out eyes and a bottle in his hand, and the little teddy has a worried expression on his face, and the caption says, “Daddy, why do you drink?” This probably tells you more about the Rabbit than my comics do. She also had a surreal one about Sylvia Plath, except Plath was represented as a roast turkey. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you probably don’t have an English degree. But trust me, it’s darkly humorous.

I fell into a click hole the other day at a website called getoffmyinternets.net (GOMI), which is basically a platform for a sarcastic blogger to make fun of other bloggers. The author chooses her targets–they’re exclusively the sort of  entitled popular attention-seekers who post dozens of pictures of themselves and their fabulous lifestyles we secretly want to watch fail–and takes a bitter joy in tearing them down, or, as often happens, watching from the sidelines as they self-destruct. She’s talking about people with thousands of followers, with monetized sites, with book deals, so it’s not as if she’s hurting anyone. These people will sink or swim regardless of her snarky opinion.

Still, after a dozen or so pages, I started to feel bad about myself for reading it. After all, if you think someone’s blog is overly precious, or ostentatious, or oozing with braggadocio, or petty, or stupid, or ugly, or pointless, or whatever, you can just not read it. Sure, it’s frustrating to see someone you deem utterly talentless succeeding on any level, particularly when you can’t reach that level yourself (I would know), it’s utterly unhealthy to focus on your distaste and make it the target of all your emotional expression (I would know).

Obviously, GOMI is successful because it’s mean, because it doesn’t pull punches, and because it lacks any sympathy for its victims. It doesn’t play safe.

You can like something even when you think it’s inappropriate. Weeks ago I read a scathing criticism of the fact that in Age of Ultron, Tony Stark makes a joke about prima nocta–that is: a rape joke. And yes joking about rape is horrible (although I would argue that this sort of thing results from the existence of the rape culture, rather than being responsible for its perpetuation) but to be totally honest, I laughed when I heard the joke in the theater last weekend. Hardly anyone else laughed, although I expect this was more because hardly anyone else got it, rather than because people were unamused by a casual historic reference to state-sanctioned rape.

The viewer knows that Tony Stark would never consider raping anyone, because he’s a billionaire philanthropist playboy genius and probably needs the Iron Man suit just to keep women from crushing him to death with their desire to get on him. And it’s totally the kind of unconsidered joke the character would make. (That was sort of the point of the movie, that Stark is a guy who is so intent on answering “Can we?” that he doesn’t consider “Should we?”) Sure, the movie would have been just as successful had he made no joke at all, or if he had instead joked about some other right of totalitarian dictators, but–screw it–I’m sorry, but that joke was funny to me, in context. It was dark and violent and inappropriate and it made me laugh at loud.

By and large, I’ve tried to keep my blog rated-G. My stepkids and my nephews read it sometimes, and other family members, and, I would imagine, my stepkids’ other family members. Occasionally I edge into PG territory. Anyone who actually knows me probably realizes what an accomplishment this is, because I myself am a basically R to NC-17 kind of person, despite the fact that I’m able to dial it back in the presence of children, the elderly, and the ethically prudish. So I drew this comic a while ago, and a big part of me wanted to run it because it amuses *me*, but at the same time, what it is is very dark, in its way. It’s different than what I’ve run in the last year. (Oh, wow, it’s been a year….)

Let me say this: I understand that domestic violence is NOT FUNNY. But a little girl’s relationship with her stuffed animals and primary love object can be very funny. Anyway, if you don’t like me, you’re free to get the hell off my Internets. The inside of my head is a weird place, and not everything can be compartmentalized all the time.

Dragon Comics 105

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Sometimes a dragon just wants an aloe rub, a glass of ice water, and to get a little appreciation around here!

Sometimes a dragon just wants an aloe rub, a glass of ice water, and to get a little appreciation around here!

After reading Wednesday’s comic, The Man was immediately incredulous that a fire breathing dragon could possibly burn. Game of Thrones has taught us that much. I must attribute his newfound ability to anticipate me to my excellent tutelage in understanding story structure.

At least my real life sunburn has faded. The Man, of course, cannot say the same, because he is so very white.

Relationships, of course, require mutual caregiving. Even when one party doesn’t have an expressible need. Sometimes you just need someone to bring you a glass of water.

Further Thoughts on Color Correction in Photoshop

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The more I play around with the “Enhance” feature in Adobe Photoshop, the more I question the nature of reality. If a photograph isn’t a perfect visual representation of a moment in time, how can we trust something as subjective as memory?

Sun sets over the cove at Long Gulch on the north side of Lake Roosevelt

Sun sets over the cove at Long Gulch on the north side of Lake Roosevelt

The Man and I watched this sunset, and I’m certain that every moment was dazzling, and that the stones on the lakeshore truly did glow in the golden light of the setting sun. And yet, the original photograph was flatter than memory. Then I messed with the levels in Photoshop; now the stones glow. Still, did they glow to that degree? The sky probably wasn’t quite so blue, and of course the sun was sharper.

Complicating matters, I have long since stopped trusting my own eyes. My vision gets worse every year; I wear prism lenses to correct some of the problem, further distorting my view of reality, even though my brain corrects back to true, most of the time. In addition, I don’t do anything in natural light without polarized lenses, which sharpen everything and amplify colors. The world looks much crisper, and more beautiful, in polarized lenses.

A verdant piece of desert

A verdant piece of desert

This one, obviously, can’t be right. It reminds me of a picture postcard from the ’50s, when, I guess color photography was a novelty and all the colors were boosted into glorious technicolor. The sky is even bluer than in the previous image. This was a fast fix; results would probably be better had I worked on different parts of the image separately: the sky, the saguaros, the rest of the plants, the rocks, the water. At heart, I see with the eyes of a child, and the brighter colors delight me. I’ll take paintbox primaries over reality any day, I guess.

The flower of the saguaro cactus

The flower of the saguaro cactus

This is the most confusing one. I still don’t have a zoom lens for the Canon EOS, and if you know anything about saguaros, you know that getting close to their flowers can be tricky. Most of the flower are on the top of the plant, and a mature saguaro can grow as high as 50 feet, while I myself stand only a touch over 5. We spent days looking for a cactus that was either growing below the ridge, or else had a frostbite damaged arm that hung in my line of sight. No such luck on this trip, and the saguaro only blooms for a short while. I had to resort to the Powershot, which has a great zoom feature, even though the picture quality is of course not as details as with the DSLR.

But here’s the thing: the zoom feature is much better than my eyesight, so good that I have often used it in place of binoculars. It allows me to see things in sharp focus that would otherwise appear as distant blurs. So I couldn’t even tell you what these flowers really looked like because I never really got a good look at them myself. I couldn’t even really see the display since the sun was shining directly on it AND I was wearing polarized lenses. This photo pretty much involved just waving the camera in the general direction of the thing I wanted to shoot and hoping for something to line up.

So, what does the world look like? It’s not exactly what I see with my eyes, even with corrective lenses, and it’s not precisely what the camera returns to me, and it’s definitely not what photos look like after hue and saturation and balance. Every image is filtered these days; everything is Photoshopped. We can’t trust the visual world.

Dragon Comics 104

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And you forgot the ice water!

And you forgot the ice water!

This is the comic I would have posted last night, had I not been completely road burned from our epic drive through the Tonto Wilderness over the Mogollan Rim. I actually wrote the script last week; and it’s moderately ironic, because The Man and I were hiking in the desert on Sunday and even though we wore sunscreen, we both got burnt. I only burned a little, as my ancestry is Mediterranean and my whiteness comes with a decent amount of melanin all things considered. The Man, however, is of the Nordic persuasion and couldn’t be much whiter if he tried. His sunburn was especially hilarious because he wore a knee brace (on account of the 3 pins he got in his knee after driving a motorcycle into a guard rail) so he has a perfect red circle on his knee, inside a perfect white square. It’s a unique burn.

I helped him with the aloe.

Other than that and perhaps 1 or 2 tiny inconveniences associated with camping in a place with no services, if you catch my meaning (i.e. no plumbing), it was a stellar trip. We saw many wonderful creatures: jackrabbits, quails, egrets, herons, hawks, buzzards, and so on. Fish were literally jumping out of the lake. Flowers were blooming all over the desert. The weather couldn’t have been lovelier; ditto the scenery. We were on the north side of Lake Roosevelt, where no one goes unless they have a boat. We pretty much had to drive down a cow track to get there, and we had an entire cove to ourselves. So that makes up for the lack of plumbing.

My Memorial Day Post

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You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go.

If all goes according to plan, when this little drawing goes live, I will be way, way, WAY off the grid, far away from any sort of amenity that features running water. This is a shame, because, while I love nature, I am also fairly dependent on those running water features and am uncertain how I will do without them. At least without the most necessary one. However, we will be next to a lake, so there will be *some* options.

Camping is not a big one in my repertoire. I’ve gone a handful of times, but always to a campsite with bathrooms and fire pits and such. I don’t have any camping skills, except for the ability to cook gourmet meals over an open fire. That’s actually the reason I don’t have any camping skills: I would always be so busy cooking that other people were required to pitch my tent, &c. It’s another one of my super privileges. No one has ever even considered that I should learn to pitch a tent. It was always assumed that someone else would do it for me, because I was cooking a 3-course meal over an open flame in the dark. That’s just how I roll.

We’re not even going to pitch a tent: we’ve got a futon jammed into the back of a Honda Element. I have a decent expectation for us being more or less comfortable there. It should be dark; even the moon is just a bitty sliver this weekend. It should be quiet; there will most likely be very few people around, if any.

Well, if this site is never updated again, you’ll know why. I’m lost in the wilderness and have possibly been eaten by a bear.

The birds I’ve drawn are just fanciful birds. The balloon and the feather/leaf thing are me working with light. The balloon seems to have come out pretty well, for what it’s meant to be. For the feather, I was messing around trying to draw an iridescent effect. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than I could have done before I drew the blue morpho butterfly. The quote above is from Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go!, which I read every year to kindergarteners the penultimate week of school. It’s summer break already around here, which is a good time for adults to stop and take stock.

Oh! Also, I finally wrote a kids’ book review for Best Children’s Books, a site I haven’t posted on in more than a year: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Read it! Then click on the Amazon link!

Anyway, I’ll be in the desert.

These Things Happen

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What? It's not like we don't share the same kingdom.

What? It’s not like we don’t share the same kingdom.

Just a silly little comic. The teddy bear thing was a *bit* off color; it may come around a bit later. But here’s a small sketch of a blossoming friendship based on mutual interests.

We have a little date tree like this in the front yard and the dates are getting closer to harvest time. They’re really better if you go in early in the spring and cut half the dates off; it allows the other dates to get bigger. Otherwise you end up with a million tiny dates that are 90% pit. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cull some of them. They need to be dried for a bit after harvesting, but fortunately, the desert atmosphere is perfect for this. You can just lay the strands of dates down on the porch and eat new dates in a few days.