OK, I lied yesterday. This is at least a 3-part comic. Maybe longer. Apparently I can get away with whatever it is I’m doing here, because yesterday was this blog’s best-ever day for page views.
Yeah, the snake’s sort of a jerk. We’ve all met the snake.
So: conflict! Is Dragon just going to lie down and take this crap? Can she retaliate? Who let that snake in, anyway? Come back tomorrow for more answers.
So this is part one of a 2-part comic that I’ve been meaning to draw from QWERTYvsDvorak’s inception. Obviously, I can draw a little bit better than this, even on the tablet, but I wanted to tell the story with a minimum of fuss. There’s something fun about the awful quality of the artwork.
These characters aren’t exactly fictional. I’m pretty sure the people I’m referencing will recognize themselves and hopefully have a decent sense of humor about it. Come back to tomorrow for part 2 of “What are you doing, Dragon?” the question I ask myself. Every. Single. Day.
Can dragon successfully draw? Will these interruptions ever cease? Where’s the conflict here? Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of “What are you doing, Dragon?”
If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, you might have noticed a certain exuberant satisfaction to his voice whenever he describes the eating of one unwilling organism by another faster or stronger or more clever organism. “Take that, life” his intonation seems to say. “You have been consumed by one more powerful and more deserving than you, and in any case, ha! There is a finality to all things, and yours has come. Now let us celebrate the continuation of life through the destruction of life, admiring the rightness of the situation.” Or maybe I read too much into his tone.
Original sketch, Squid vs Whale
Anyway, like many nerd girls, I vastly admire cephalopods in all their forms, and like anyone with a spark of imagination, I cannot help but sit in awe of any sort of megafauna: giant squids, of course, and just as naturally, the world’s largest animal, the blue whale, who is really a remarkable creature. This is probably the fastest and easiest finished design in my Red Bubble store. The sketch itself was done after looking at a few photographs, and the digital design required no augmentation. It’s a bit threadbare in one sense, but I love the way the colors pop on a black background.
A T-shirt for people who enjoy hugging.
You can get this T-shirt in a variety of colors and styles, but I do think the black backgrund works best. If you’re going to go for this kind of dubious humor, you might as well make it stand out. It is also kind of cute as a tote bag or a sticker.
Wear your heart on your shoulder.
The world wants a little cheering up today, and these unconventional dragons are happy to serve their purpose.
Grizeldi, a Dragon Boat. Grizeldi is a working dragon
I was a working dragon myself today. Still retaining a couple freelance writing clients enables me to bang out words in exchange for money. Writing is my especial talent, just as cutting through the glacial blue waters of the Norwegian fjords is Grizeldi’s. He takes pride in his sturdy wooden construction and his ability to transport a heavy cargo of pillage, plunder, and loot.
Portia, a Hoarding Dragon. Portia’s hoard is a small one, as she is a small dragon and has not had much time to accumulate it, but it is a high quality hoard.
Meanwhile, Portia slumbers upon a bed of gold pieces. Dragons require a great deal of rest.
This is actually a sketch of Algernon, who passed away a few weeks ago. If Lupin noticed I was drawing her portrait she would deliberately move every 15 seconds and probably try to take the pencil out of my hand. Just imagine a fluffy black ball of evil with poisonous yellow eyes.
I’m not much of a poet. But Lupin is not much of a cat.
Lupin, a Long-Hair
I am a kitty with fur so fine
I sit on your things to prove that they’re mine
I know that you love me because I’m divine
I love you too but won’t give you a sign
You scream at dead mousies? I’ll bring you some more
You don’t need these books, right? I’ll knock them to the floor
You’re trying to sleep now? I’ll scratch on this door
You cleaned up my fur dread? I’ll just shed four
When your stepkids pet me I’ll scratch at their faces
When your husband gets dressed I’ll eat his bootlaces
When you drop your elastics I’ll hide them in places
When you invite friends in I’ll lick without graces
Because I’m the queen I must always be free
Because there’s a window I must climb up to see
Because I’m the kitty I’ll tell you the key
Because you’re my person you must always love me
(This sketch is from an exercise in the Trickster’s Hat that I did not do properly. But it’s a nice sketch of a cat much more lovable than the one in whose honor I dashed these verses.)
If your car has to break down in the middle of the desert on a summer’s day someplace you don’t get any cell reception, a national park is a good place for it to happen. Instead of dying of dehydration or getting stranded for the weekend, you can get federal employees to make phone calls and bring you ice water. If you’re lucky, a kindly family of Dutch tourists will invite you to share their picnic lunch under the ramada.
A fast sketch of the Eldon Ruins
After a productive week on retreat (15,000 words, 47 layout thumbnails, 5 blog posts, and 3 book reviews, and 1 workshop plus the side trip to the Grand Canyon), my husband instructed me not to come home too fast, so he could have a chance to clean up the evidence of his bachelor lifestyle before I arrived. I decided to check out the Eldon Pueblo before I left Flagstaff. It’s an extremely accessible site compared to a lot of Sinagua ruins, and fairly extensive, and also more pleasant to visit than many, since it’s in a grassy and wooded area rather than on a barren, treeless hill.
From there, I drove 50 miles to one of my favorite places on earth, Montezuma Well, which houses another lovely set of ruins. This is where my car stopped working. Eventually my car and I were towed to a garage, where I spent a cheerful 4 1/2 hours sitting outside (they didn’t have any AC!). Staying true to the spirit of retreat, the first thing I did was sketch my sad, broken down car, sitting in the parking lot, next to some agaves. You can also see the back end of a horse up on the hill.
The view from the Beaver Creek Auto Service Center
Mainly, I just tried to stay hydrated and calm and trust that everything would be OK as I drew, read, and wrote. I was lucky to find a decent mechanic willing to put in the overtime to make sure I got home on a Friday afternoon! I was lucky to get an extra 5 1/2 hour adventure in the American southwest. It could have easily been much longer, and much more expensive.
Finding myself without any pithy observations regarding art, writing, or the intersection between the two, allow me instead to offer a completely random assortment of recent-ish images.
Let’s call it a snake in the grass: torn paper mosaic from 2013
I’m pleased that today was a good day, writing-wise. Got about 3500 words out on this graphic novel script, which is nothing to sneeze at, although I could have done a few thousand more words if I’d been stern with myself.
Have a pointy mandala why not? This one puts me in mind of a compass rose. It’s quite skewed.
I also read and critiqued a friend’s essay and discussed it in what was essentially a one-woman workshop. As an old veteran of Iowa-style workshop (I’ve taken 10 of those suckers, 6 at the graduate level) I can offer pretty good feedback. Would that I could read my own writing the way I read others’.
October 2013 I apparently cut out some weird looking pumpkins. The one in the center is by far the saddest jack-o-lantern I have ever created.
This bulletin board is one I didn’t like well enough to put in my original gallery of bulletin boards, but it’s OK. Eventually, I’ll get them all up. The quote, if you can’t read it, is from Percy Bysshe Shelly: “There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky.” Since I have space considerations, and my target audience is on average, 8 years old, I often use small segments of quotes. This one continues, “which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!”
My traveling companion wanted to meet up with an old friend she hadn’t seen in 30 years. He works as a singing cowboy on the Grand Canyon Railroad and she is interviewing people about the intersection between art and culture. Normally, I wouldn’t spend that much time away from my desk on writing retreat, but this promised to be a special sojourn.
Singing cowboys for the win! The one on the right is my friend’s friend, and he was very wonderful.
My friend’s friend got us on the train for free, for which I was grateful. It’s a pricey experience, even at the lower levels of luxury, and the train takes about 3 times as long as it would to drive (135 minutes to go 65 miles). Since we were friends with the cowboy, we got some freebies and were able to hang out on the back of the caboose and watch the track peel away behind us, which I have wanted to do my entire life. (Yes, it was everything I envisioned.)
No picture of the Grand Canyon does it justice, which basically makes my attempts to sketch it kind of futilely hilarious.
While my friend went off to reminisce about the old times and do some preliminary interviewing, I walked along the rim a bit and did a little writing and a lot of sketching. The problems with sketching the Grand Canyon are a) it’s huge, b) there’s a lot going on visually, and c) the shadows change every 15 seconds.
Sorry about this reproduction. I very seriously considered bringing the scanner with me to Flagstaff. I would have used it! But I was afraid it would get hurt/broken.
The Grand Canyon is an impressionist’s fantasy. It’s all light and shadow. It was hard to render in pencil. When I did try to focus on the dark parts, the clouds kept moving, so the dark parts kept changing. I’m not dissatisfied with this attempt. If I had kept at it longer, I think it would have improved. The digital drawing tablet might have rendered better results, but the sun shone too brightly to really use the computer.
The shadow knows…
After I got frustrated with the first sketch, I mailed some postcards to my nephews and sat down in a different place, thinking of focusing on a smaller section of the landscape. Before I started, I noticed that the tree above me cast some interesting shadows on the paper, and I decided to just draw the shadows, as an easier exercise. My sketch is not quite as awesome as the shadows were, plus you can see through to the next page. Oh, well.
A few details
Then I decided to focus on one tiny canyon, which you can see in the middle, before getting distracted by some interesting trees. The trees are not bad for the time spent.
Tiny details
Here I try a couple views of a squashed pine cone and a bit of pine that fell on the walkway. All in all, I’m really glad I went, but maybe I shouldn’t have walked so much. I could have gotten more accomplished.
It’s been a couple years, but this still gets me.
The Dissertation Mandala: everything is complicated.
Just deleted an 800 word post, because it didn’t say what I meant it to say.
The story of this mandala, in short, is that I had a friend for 17 years, a close friend, a woman I considered one of my best friends. Although there was a parabolic pattern to her love for me, I always loved her. However, we fought with increasing tendency, until she eventually told me, in no uncertain terms, never to contact her again.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that, but the story of this mandala is that, maybe six months or a year after she broke my heart, she emailed to say that she still never wanted to talk to me again, but she did want to hire me to edit her Ph.d. thesis, and for various reasons, only one of which was money, I accepted.
It was a hard edit. The dissertation was hundreds of pages long, and its quality didn’t come close to her previous work that I had read throughout our friendship. It took a couple weeks to make a single pass on the manuscript. She seemed satisfied with what I’d done and paid me; I haven’t heard from her since, although I miss her often.
This mandala depicts the layers of emotion and complexity I felt while reading her work.
If this onesie looks small to you, don’t worry. Rainbird is available in a wide variety of sizes and on many products.
Throw off the burden of darkness and feast your eyes upon this updated version of my original design. Rainbird still believes you can make your own magic, but it’s more of a tacit message.
The thought still holds true, but the shirt seems better balanced without the text. Live and learn.
As pictured, this onesie cost $18.04. You can buy it here. You can also find it in kid and adult sizes all the way up to 3XL and on tote bags, pillows, phone cases, stickers, of course, and also paper. See all products here.
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