A Basic Workday Mandala

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What you see is what you get

What you see is what you get

This design seems plain to me; had I started it in Photoshop it would feel far from finished. Clearly it wants elaborate dotting to achieve its full sacred potential, but it goes about as far as it can go in its medium. Standard floral motif with a limited color palette. At least I managed to scan a couple weeks’ worth, and I’m pretty excited about some of the mandalas coming up in the next 2 months. There are some really stunning and elaborate designs I’d completely forgotten about.

My sickness is diminished; I can breathe fine and am hardly coughing/sneezing. My 2 straight months of being sick this winter has provided my immune system with a more effective arsenal, perhaps. I was too tired for salsa dancing though.

Not to tired to draw! Hooray! Let’s do that!

Dragon Comics 89

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Being inappropriate isn't funny at all. It's serious, serious business. It takes dedication and endurance.

Being inappropriate isn’t funny at all. It’s serious, serious business. It takes dedication and endurance.

This comic and its accompanying blog post brought to you courtesy of I can’t believe I’m sick again and also by Walgreen’s brand cold medicine. Except actually I can believe I’m sick again because airplanes are basically giant petri dishes.

Even so I managed to finish an article about a dinosaur comic and completed the full range of human duties: I cooked, I cleaned, I performed childcare. And I drew this comic, to overall, it’s a win. To hell with you, rhinovirus.

Bonus: also had my modestly nsfw XXXenophile post on Panels today.

Basically What It Looks Like in My Brain

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Walking Eye: So I'm a walking eye Green Vegetal Forest Spirit: Forest spirit. And my friend's a forest spirit too. Wee Glowing Forest Spirit: Hey

Walking Eye: So I’m a walking eye
Green Vegetal Forest Spirit: Forest spirit. And my friend’s a forest spirit too.
Wee Glowing Forest Spirit: Hey

For a while now I’ve been doing a lot of the same thing, and I’ve learned a lot doing it, but ordinarily, when I’m just drawing to draw, I don’t draw the same thing over and over. There are definite themes, and there are topics that I mine again and again, but when I draw, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, today’s Little Red is a different Little Red than yesterday’s Little Red.

I can tell already we're going to be the best of friends!

Little Red Riding Hood: I can tell already we’re going to be the best of friends!
Wolf: ::slavers::

Although, there does tend to be a lot of sexual tension between the girl and wolf.

There are lots of birds and fish and flowers and stars. Animals and fruit come up as often as fairy tales, and the style tends to be fluid. My friend the Vampire Bat once remarked that my art doesn’t have a recognizable style–this changes from image to image, I guess because I’m still searching for my style, or rather, I’ve never been satisfied with the way I draw.

This is basically the way I draw when I’m not trying to draw like someone else.

Turtle: I could absolutely *murder* a strawberry right now. Strawberry: Oh, god, please, no! I'm too ripe to die

Turtle: I could absolutely *murder* a strawberry right now.
Strawberry: Oh, god, please, no! I’m too ripe to die

Dragon Comics are fun, but these are the kind of comics that I draw constantly, without thinking about it. They don’t take hours. They don’t always make sense, although usually that’s part of the humor. They sort of make sense to me. And they always amuse me, which is the standard, right?

A snail licking the rim of a margarita glass for some reason

A snail licking the rim of a margarita glass for some reason

Usually I scratch stuff like this out on the backs of junk mail envelopes, keep them around for a couple months, perhaps thinking that the designs could aspire to be something greater, and then, eventually throw them in recycling when I find them jammed under the leg of my desk covered in cat hair. I’ve got dozens of notebooks from high school and college, the margins filled with these little guys. I’ve been thinking I should do something with my favorite parts and recycle the rest of those notebooks, too.

When I first started with the tablet, little cartoons like these would come out very rough and basic. I sort of advance in fits and starts: learn a few things, get comfortable with them, get dependent on them, then suddenly realize that there’s more to learn. Then I pick up a couple more techniques. Probably it would be more efficient to read a book about Photoshop and the manual for the Wacom Tablet, but that’s just now how my mind works. I’ve got to figure it out myself.

Dragon Comics 88

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Also, dragons are so pretty they'll get everything for free.

Also, dragons are so pretty they’ll get everything for free.

This comic is about privilege. White privilege, class privilege, cis privilege, hetero privilege, whatever. It’s pretty much all the same. I should know, because while people who know me will attest that I’m a freak on, like, a lot of levels, to the casual observer all of that is hidden. What shows on the surface are the lucky accidents of birth. I’m super-privileged.

I think about it a lot, even if I’m not talking about it. But it happened again yesterday: I got waved through to the pre-screen security line in one of the world’s largest airports. I didn’t have to wait in line, I didn’t have to take off my shoes or my jacket or take out my computer or my phone. A guy sized me up as I took 3 steps toward him and determined I was not a security risk and forced a privilege upon me.

And it occurred to me that this happens as often as not in any big airport. I’ve gotten waved through to the special lane lots of times, and I never get pulled out for extra scrutiny. The only time my luggage has ever been searched was when I borrowed someone else’s suitcase, and unbeknownst to me, this person had left a 6-inch switchblade in the side pocket. The TSA agent pulled it out, laughed, said, “This isn’t yours is it?” and let me go.

I was caught carrying a switchblade through airport security, and the federal employee whose job it is to address crime took a single glance at me, determined I was not capable of criminal activity, and laughed it off. We laughed about it together. There was a heartbeat when I thought, “Well, I’m not going to LA today; I’m going to jail.” But I look white, and female, and straight, and well-off, and not like a security risk, so that TSA agent never suspected that I have carried contraband through airport security on more than one occasion.

And then there’s all the times in my life that I was doing something illegal and cops didn’t even bother to look twice.

Privilege means knowing that mistakes are going to be made in your favor. It’s the freedom to assume that the rules don’t apply to you. It’s a careless security.

Dragon Comics 87

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Silly Dragon...beds are for sleeping in, not for obsessing about things you can't do anything about at the moment. Don't get me started on what daytime is for.

Silly Dragon…beds are for sleeping in, not for obsessing about things you can’t do anything about at the moment. Don’t get me started on what daytime is for.

This comic sort of seemed like it should have another punchline in the 4th panel, but the punchline is: insomnia. If have it, you get it. If you haven’t got it, you’re lucky. I’ve had it my entire life. I can literally remember lying in my bed at the age of 3, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, even though my parents had long since gone to bed and it was the middle of the night. On a good night, it typically takes me about 45 minutes to go under. Since I’ve been here, it’s more like 4 or 5 hours. Tossing and turning and rolling over to note that the sky is lightening and another day has dawned despite my inability to put the previous day to bed (so to speak) provokes a scary mix of dread and futility.

Of course, I still wake up at approximately my regular time, even if I’ve only passed out a few hours before. Then I sleepwalk through the day, vaguely hurting and feeling ineffective. All week.

In real life, of course, I sleep next to The Man, who could not accompany me on this trip. So I’m sort of used to his presence, and it makes me comfortable. And I’ve grown accustomed to the sound of his CPAP, which is a sort of reassuring reminder that he’s still breathing, and helps me relax. And we sleep in a queen sized waterbed, which we’ve had for 5 years. When you like sleeping in a waterbed, there’s really no substitute. Well, maybe there is, but a 30-year-old twin mattress on a bunk bed is not it.

If there’s an upside to chronic insomnia it’s that lack of sleep skews your perception of time, which can be an upside if it makes the day go by quickly, or if it makes the recent past feel like the distant past. In other words, insomnia makes you suffer, but you experience the suffering in a compressed way, and then file it in your brain as a long-ago memory.

A Digilicious Mandala

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My soul isn't perfect; why should my mandalas be?

My soul isn’t perfect; why should my mandalas be?

One of the reasons that crayon mandalas became less prevalent in my day-to-day life is that I felt I was reaching the limits of the abstract form and beginning to repeat myself. The representative ones were still original, but those take a lot more forethought and don’t spill out in the same organic way as the purely geometric ones.

When I did last week’s mandala on the tablet, I had to start over again with the form in some ways. I had to let go, again, of the idea of perfection. Now I start to see more possibilities.

With crayon, what’s done is done. You can stack a little bit of color with Crayolas but not with great detail. You can’t really go past a certain level of detail in crayon, whereas the tablet lets you get down to the pixels, and, of course, to add layers, so that you can always get something on top of whatever you’ve done. So that’s what I’ve been exploring here, and I’m actually much happier with the result than I was with last week’s circles. Something about the dots and lines reminds me of various types of indigenous folk art. I think I can really start to get even more impressive results, and hopefully come up with something T-shirt worthy.

In the real world, I still have a few more days in the cold place, although it has been warming up. Crocuses and snowdrops and narcissus–the first flowers of spring–are just poking their heads through the soil, and everywhere you go, landscapers are trying to untangle the mess of this unreasonable winter. It’s increasingly difficult to function; sleep is elusive here, in a narrow bed, without The Man, without some of the comforts of home that help me sleep. It becomes debilitating very fast. Maybe tonight will be the night that I sleep for 8 hours without interruption.

Dragon and the Whole Day of Collaborative Navel Gazing

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Oh, my goodness, no, I did NOT go to the beach. This is still one of the cold places of the world. But I drove *past* the beach. And I *thought* about the beach.

Oh, my goodness, no, I did NOT go to the beach. This is still one of the cold places of the world. But I drove *past* the beach. And I *thought* about the beach.

Today I met up with an old friend and we somehow spent 10+ hours talking: past, present, future. When you have been friends with someone more or less continuously for decades, you have a lot of things you can talk about. You can talk about hilarious things you did in the past, and people you used to know, and you can talk about what you are doing now, and what other people are doing, and you can talk about what you want to do in the future. You can get really introspective and deconstructive. You can talk about what things meant, then and now, and what they might mean later. You can cast the eye of experience upon your own innocence, and you can laugh about things that were once terribly serious to you. You can parse out what’s important, and you can articulate why it’s important. You can compare and contrast past and present, and you can compare and contrast each others’ lives. You can visit places you used to visit regularly but haven’t seen in years. You can contact other old friends and repeat the entire process in a smaller space, either by video chatting them from a meaningful spot in the old neighborhood, or by meeting up with them someplace new in the neighborhood where they live now.

As a bonus, if you don’t visit the old neighborhood very often, and your friends are reasonably successful adults, and you are as cool as Dragon, your friends will insist on buying all your food and drinks, which is super nice when you are unemployed.

Of course, if you spent the entire day doing this, you will have very little time to do the things you usually do in a day, like draw comics and write blog posts. And you can come home and ask yourself how important it is that you honor your own commitment to yourself, particularly after you’ve spent the day explaining to your old friends why you quit your very lucrative job to start a project that ultimately pays about $1 a day. And you can realize that it’s really, really important. So you just do it.

Also today The Man was sad to be far away from Dragon and one of the Misseses Kitty had to go to the hospital but will hopefully be OK. So send love to The Man and Mrs. Kitty because Dragon cannot be there to take care of them.

Dragon and the Urban Jungle Gym

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The work of the child is to play.

The work of the child is to play.

As threatened, this day was spent in taking a commuter train into a big city for no particular purpose except to entertain children. The children were entertained. They very much enjoyed the train ride. When we arrived in the big city, the children wanted to eat. Although this big city, like all big cities, is known for offering a wide variety of excellent cuisine, we ate at the food court in a mall. It was an upscale food court, but it was a food court. We walked past some very interesting food trucks and a few famous restaurants in order to eat at this department store food court.

Then we walked on to what is possibly the finest urban playground $55 million can buy. When completed, this playground will cover an astonishing twenty acres land. Even in its unfinished state, its structures are too many to easily count. We didn’t even visit every section of the playground, let alone use every piece of equipment. The slides are without number, and some of them are sort of ridiculously fast. Above, you can see a good chunk of an actual tube slide, on the inside of which I hit my head the first time because it’s hard to navigate that sort of curve while protecting a small child on your lap. You can only see a fraction of the climbing structure you need to maneuver through to read the tube slide. The structure is deliberately designed to make it fairly difficult for full-size adult humans to reach the top. I am a good bit smaller than a full-size adult human and it was tight.

In the picture, Dragon and a trio of dragonets slide down one of the more conservative slides. In the picture, Dragon and a trio of dragonets have the entire park to themselves, which, as you can imagine, is not the case with the actual park, which is filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of children and their parents.

Dragon on the Town

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These things are all extremely important.

These things are all extremely important.

Here, in the cold part of the world, on a journey that I would not in any way describe as a vacation, we have some missions. Mission number 1 (tomorrow as I writing this, yesterday as you’re reading it), we must drive to an outlet mall and obtain a small Goofy plush at the Disney store. This is crazy important. My niece obtained all the other small Disney plushies but they didn’t have Goofy. She explained this, plaintively, over Skype, and my dad told her he would buy her Goofy. That was like 9 months ago and she didn’t forget. She’s 4.

The next day, we must take the train. We don’t know where we’re taking the train, or why. The train is pretty much the goal, just to ride a train, because my nephews didn’t get to ride the train last time. Hopefully the train goes somewhere interesting.

It’s very lovely for the kids, and, as any adult with kids and a good relationship with their parents knows, there’s something very special about having a grandparent. Here are these people who will just give the kids whatever they ask for, all the time, most particularly stuff you couldn’t have gotten from them when you were a kid. Drive to an outlet mall and buy me a toy so I can complete my collection? My dad would have laughed his head off 35 years ago.

I’m sort of worried about what happens if we get to the outlet mall and they don’t have Goofy.

If I’m lucky, I’ll get a pair of pants that fit.

And that is a great journey for a kid: getting that toy so you have the whole set? Golden. Adults don’t get to experience that kind of joy, by and large. My parents presents to me are like: a month’s mortgage payment. Which–don’t get me wrong, that’s great stuff–but it’s not fun. It just reminds me about how much the mortgage is. And also that I will never again be as excited about anything as my niece is about obtaining this $5 doll.

Personally, I always found Goofy sort of creepy.

The third item in this image is a cheap racetrack, where Sonic the Hedgehog and Knuckles are racing Dragon. It’s a lame track–the pieces don’t hold together and the cars run on batteries, and without batteries the back wheels don’t turn at all. But when you’re 4, you don’t care. You just keep pushing this thing in circles, and you force other to push too.

Let’s take a moment to reflect that the character Knuckles got his name apparently because he wears gloves with spikes on the knuckles. It’s sort of like the monkey in Dora the Explorer being called Boots. Presumably because he wears boots. So…what did they call them before they obtained these articles of clothing? What if he takes off the boots? Who is he? Does he has an identity crisis without his footwear of choice?

I seem to be extraordinarily tired.

Sshhhhh…Dragon Sleeping

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Travel just turns your whole world on its ear.

Travel just turns your whole world on its ear.

This morning, I woke up many hours earlier than usual and went to my local airport, only to learn that my flight was delayed. Could have slept a little longer. Eventually we got an airplane, but for some reason it was frigid inside, like an actual refrigerator. There were no blankets and we were all curled into the fetal position trying to maintain our core temperature (they gate checked my bag so I couldn’t get another hoodie; I had my arms inside my shirt and a canvas bag over my knees). Then, we started to land, actually got to the runway of the next airport, descended to right above the tree line, bounced up and down in the air a few times, then suddenly ascended steeply and banked hard to the left, after which we circled the city and came down on the same approach again, landing normally the second time with no explanation offered. It was a really surreal moment, particularly because I had just been reading all the conjecture about the co-pilot deliberately crashing that Germanwings plane.

Of course I missed my original connection, but I got booked on a second flight, which, of course, was also delayed. When the plane finally showed up and we boarded it, it was one of those sitting on the tarmac for all eternity situations. At least this plane was heated and the seats were nominally nicer than the ones on the first plane (it was one of those skinny numbers with only 3 seats in each row, 2 on one side of the aisle and 1 on the other and you almost feel like a veal cow in a box) and they claimed they gave me the extra legroom row to make up for the inconvenience, but if that was extra legroom, I don’t know how normal sized humans fit into the regular legroom, because I am fairly petite, and I was smushed. Also, they gate checked my bag so I had to hang around to get that back afterward, breathing carbon monoxide fumes the whole time. And the place I had to fly to is one of the cold places of the world.

Anyway, that explains why I didn’t draw a comic today, but not why I spent 45 minutes drawing a Boeing 747 and a sleeping Dragon. I cannot explain that. Must sleep now.