Tag Archives: art

Flowers in the Desert Bulletin Board

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Remember kids, measure twice, cut once.

Remember kids, measure twice, cut once.

If you don’t recall the New Wave band Big Country and their hit single “In a Big Country,” go ahead and familiarize yourself with this seminal work of early ’80s pop music. It’s got a catchy beat and a good message. If you’re not familiar with ’80s music, don’t get freaked out by the intro. Just go with it.

Yesterday, I wrote down some quotes that I thought of using for the holiday bulletin board, and I stuck them in my wallet, and then I left my wallet at home when I came back and couldn’t remember the quotes. This song gets stuck in my head sometimes, though, and the clock was ticking. Long story short, because nothing got started yesterday, this one really came down to the wire. I didn’t have any extra time, and ended up going 45 minutes over my budgeted time, which explain why I screwed up the text so badly. I can’t believe that last E got stuck on the sun. It’s really upsetting. There are like 12 things I could have done differently to avoid that situation, but there it is. When you don’t schedule properly, and you rush, things don’t come out as well. All of the Es are too big, and I knew they were, but these were from the second batch and I was too frustrated to make a third, and now I regret it.

So full of regret was I that I forgot I already had a blog post for tonight and started a comic, which is now finished, to I have tomorrow’s post as well. Bonus, I guess.

Also today: an article I wrote one Panels.net about Angela: Queen of Hel.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Mandala

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Ooh...dimensionality through texturization

Ooh…dimensionality through texturization

There came a point at which I realized that the mandalas were starting to form patterns, which allowed me to deliberately mix those patterns up. I had mandalas with crystalline structure, and mandalas that look leafy and flowery, and mandalas that had creature elements. This one combine all the three. In the center a sort of garnet-y thing in purple and red, surrounded by a sort of a green lily pad, with a feathery blue edge that reminds me of a sea creature.

Been tinkering with the same comic all weekend. It’s closer, although I still don’t have the last panel. The illustrations are coming together, at least. So I’m drawing these pictures and trying to figure out why the ones that are supposed to be kids look like adults. And then I realize that kids have great big heads on their little tiny bodies. If you don’t give them enormous heads they just look like thin adults.

Anyway, I would have gotten further but The Man wanted to watch Boyhood with me. It’s a very long film. The concept is fascinating, though. Not only could then have no way of knowing what the child actors would look like at the end of the movie, they couldn’t have written certain scenes (like when the main character rants about Facebook) before they actually pitched the film. Not to mention the music. I neglected to take any of the vast quantity of OTC medications that have been keeping my sinuses from back up into my brain, so now I have a headache, too. Still, I’m going to try to get this comic at least 50% finished tonight. Otherwise tomorrow night I’ll going nuts either scrambling to finish it or to dash out some kind of filler comic.

Man, people better appreciate.

More space than time mandala

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Things fizzle

Things fizzle

I had a lot of big plans for the end of the year, art-wise, but maybe they were too big. Or maybe I’m not equal to the task. Anyway, there’s a strong possibility that I’ll take a few days off from the blog to focus on the T-shirt shop. I’d like to add at least 3 new designs before Thanksgiving, and possibly figure out some type of advertising scheme to help me sell a couple of them. Lately I have multiple ideas for comics every night, but drawing them seems daunting and time-consuming and they’re hard to realize, ultimately. It’s easier if I get started earlier in the day, but lately The Man has been staying up late and I don’t sit down to work until close to midnight. It’s not conducive to great art.

This weekend could have been the ideal time to catch up, but instead some friends decided that it was actually the ideal time to party like it’s 1999.

How to Fly Higher Than an Eagle

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You are the wings beneath my wings.

You are the wings beneath my wings.

This Isaac Newton quote probably refers most particularly to the work of 2 great scientists who came before him: Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Although Newton is still regarded as one of the greatest scientists to ever live, having made major contributions to the fields of mathematics, optics, celestial mechanics, and of course, the study of gravity, over 300 years ago, he had to acknowledge that his leaps would not have been possible had he not studied the foundational works of those who came before.

In other words, read a book.

A crow riding an eagle

A crow riding an eagle

As for the image, there are fairy tales that involve smaller birds flying higher and farther than stronger birds by riding on their backs, and there are several sets of photographs of this phenomenon which you can Google at your leisure. It’s a documented fact that little birds sometimes hitch a ride on bigger birds.

IMG_6211

Close up on the wing. Somehow, my freehand drawing shortened the back wing considerably, which I didn’t notice until after I cut it out, andI ended up having to add 2 pieces to make it big enough, but that was OK, since eagles have those layers of feathers anyway. it looks better this way.

The kerning on this one is off, because I only had a really limited time to work (I actually wanted to put in clouds, but as it was it took 30 minutes longer than I wanted) and didn’t measure properly. The letters were cut pretty haphazardly, no guidelines, no rulers. I just counted the occurrence of the individual letters and cut them of folded paper, so I only had to do each shape once.

In addition, I spilled a 1/4 bottle of rubber cement all over my shirt/the cement without noticing. That’s a first for me.

A Bold Triangle Mandala

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This mandala would probably appeal to hippie Jews. Also, hippie Rastafarians. Although in my experience that phrase is basically redundant.

This mandala would probably appeal to hippie Jews. Also, hippie Rastafarians. Although in my experience that phrase is basically redundant.

All weekend I kept telling myself, “I’m going to get 1 or 2 comics finished this weekend so that I’m not driving myself crazy trying to beat midnight deadlines after crazy days all week.” Friday night we actually got in early–10:30, which is an early Friday for us–and then spent 3 hours playing Words with Friends. OK, there’s still Saturday. No, Saturday we were frantically cleaning the house in expectation of some guests, and once they arrived we went out with them, and didn’t get back until 10:30 again, at which point I had other work to catch up on for the next 3 hours. But there was still Sunday: we only had brunch plans and then had the rest of the day free. Except I had to bring soup to a sick friend, and there were a lot of things to talk about with a lot of people, and now it’s after midnight, I’m still updating a mandala post, and so far I’ve got 3/4 of a script for tomorrow and nothing else.

Monday Mandala was a good idea, but it’s removed some of the urgency of Sunday nights.

I should have an article on Panels entitled, “3 Webcomics for People Who Find Kinky Sex Hilarious.” Will update later with link.

No New Art Today; Here’s an Image

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I could have drawn a Dragon Comic about little kids wanting to pick up every single creature they come across but after the nonstop mayhem of my sister’s wedding, my brain is scrambled. I want to sleep, and even if I did draw a comic, I probably wouldn’t be able to upload it, because this hotel has the world’s worst wifi. (I’m using The Man’s hotspot but we have to turn it off soon because data costs money.) Anyway, my eyes are swimming. No drawing today.

Here instead is a photograph I took of some interesting plants growing out of what I assume is a pylon that once supported some kind of dock in Lake Whatcom, which is a funny name if you pronounce it as it’s written. The T, however, is silent: “WA-cum.” I guess it’s a funny name either way.

How long do you have to leave a chunk of wood sticking out of a lake before nature starts to reclaim it?

How long do you have to leave a chunk of wood sticking out of a lake before nature starts to reclaim it?

I had to wade out about 20 feet from the shore to get this shot; I was very cautious with the equipment. I really wish I had a waterproof camera, though, because then I would be showing you some stunning images of dragonflies on lily pads. Trust me, they were beautiful.

The Living Reef

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It's even better if you can imagine David Attenborough gleefully narrating the death throes of one sea creature as another organism devours it: "The speckled spitfish thrusts its meager stingers in all directions, but it is too late. The tentacled pseudoblob has already begun the digestion process."

It’s even better if you can imagine David Attenborough gleefully narrating the death throes of one sea creature as another organism devours it: “The speckled spitfish thrusts its meager stingers in all directions, but it is too late. The tentacled pseudoblob has already begun the digestion process.”

One of the first digital paintings I ever completed was Eilat, Coral Reef Nature Reserve, August 1999, which has its merits, all things considered, but looking back it’s almost funny. I was working off a photograph for that one, but I had not yet learned how to use layers, or basically any tool other than the brush and the color picker. I didn’t even know how to change brushes at that point, or opacity, or begun experimenting with brush modes. I never did feel 100% satisfied with that picture. I don’t mind things being deliberately rough, but in that case, I simply lacked the knowledge to take it where it needed to go.

That was 11 months ago.

This image does help me see how far I’ve come; it’s not even based on a photo. I didn’t use any reference images at all. The fish are all just bits of color that I played with until they took shape. The entire painting is basically bits of color smeared around. It’s one of my favorite things in Photoshop right now; the blur took can take the roughest image and make it look more real.

(Or, as in yesterday’s comic, it can take a more realistic image and make it look more fake.)

Some of it was probably also inspired by David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet, which is a really lovely thing to watch before bed as long as creatures eating other creatures doesn’t upset you.

The red fish is my absolute favorite. It looks perfect and I would look at it carefully before I drew another fish to see what made it work.

Another thing that’s happened since I got the Wacom tablet is that my brain has begun to dissect light everywhere. Understanding how light works when it falls on objects inspired a big leap for me in taking my work out of the purely flat realm and giving it greater dimensionality. I only tried to use realistic light and darkness in small doses here, but it really changes the character of the image.

Submission

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For my followup, I guess I'll have to vent a spleen.

For my followup, I guess I’ll have to vent a spleen.

This one might be a bit abstract. I guess it either works or it doesn’t.

It’s true that I know I don’t completely suck due to the fact that I sometimes get personalized rejection letters, and sometimes agents or publishers write me back once or twice before ignoring me, and every once in a while someone actually enjoys my fiction enough to pay for it. It’s sort of like being in the top 1% in a field where only the top .01% really succeed.

I really wanted to do a funny 1-panel comic tonight, but my ideas were either not funny or not 1-panel. My brain was in the mundane sphere due to the fact that I remembered, just as I was about to start working on my project, that my car registration needed to be renewed, and that if I didn’t go down to the DMV and get my emissions tested right that very minute, there was an extremely strong chance that I would soon be driving around with expired tags. That ate up about an hour of my life, after which I needed to do other mundane things like acquire food.

Passing emissions also reminded me that Honda had recently sent a notice that all my airbags were being recalled because they had been suddenly proven to be deadly projectile weapons that would just as soon shoot bits of metal into your chest as to save your life. But at that point I really didn’t have time to deal with the situation. So it’s entirely possible that my car is going to kill me, but at least I can prove to the government that it’s not spewing too much poison into the air.

Tropical Mandala

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Feel the salt breeze in your mind.

Feel the salt breeze in your mind.

This is, of course, a flowery-type mandala in soft shades of pink, blue, and green. It’s totally wild and not interested in your rigid ideals of symmetry. It probably smells narcotic. Insects hurl themselves into its fragrant depths.

I’m still working on my big project; clearly, it’s going to take a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it ends up looking something like what’s in my head. Maybe one day in the future I’ll have the ability to focus on my work for more than a couple hours a day, because I have way more projects going on than I’m capable of paying attention to. It’s taken me 3 days to get to the place I probably would have gotten in 3 hours in the past.

Hopefully I can get in 2 more good hours today.

Rejection Collection

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Jack also collects life experiences, but he can't sell those. Not in this market, anyway.

Jack also collects life experiences, but he can’t sell those. Not in this market, anyway.

Almost 1000 people clicked on Friday’s PTSD comic; of course my best reception would be for the worst things that have ever happened to me. I’m thrilled that it resonated with so many people, but it also re-traumatized me to write it. I thought maybe today’s comic could be a little bit more upbeat. Just a little

Jack is not the only person who frames his quest for acceptance by asking to be rejected. There’s some science there about giving yourself permission to fail in order to work your way into succeeding. There’s strong research on this, and yet it’s still kind of a hard concept to embrace.

Personally, I’m terrible at dealing with rejection. I have too many negative childhood memories of being rejected. Asking for more rejection when I’ve finally gotten to a point where it doesn’t happen otherwise feels dangerous.My collection of “Thanks but no thanks” letter from publishers is substantially smaller than Jack’s and so is my “works published” list. Jack is a good inspiration, but it’s hard to keep up with him sometimes. Still, that’s what it takes, sometimes: a relentless pursuit of ones goals.

In addition to a massive collection of rejection letters and a substantial list of published stories, Jack also owns an old card catalog, or at least he’s the custodian of this unwieldy but awesome piece of furniture, for which I also envy him.

If there’s not a spec fic magazine called Unusual Anecdotes, there should be.