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I actually don't see what you did there.

I actually don’t see what you did there.

Another serving of strangeness out of my virtual sketchbook. A fish camouflaged as an eyeball with so many rippling little fins that it almost looks furry makes perfect sense. Also, it was fun to draw. The water effect for the background really did come out beautifully. Just yesterday I was watching the ripples of sunlight on the bottom of the swimming pool and thinking how difficult it would be to capture that effect in paint. But really it’s easy with basic Photoshop tools. The little tendrils look sweet, too.

Today was another non-starter for me, but my censorship article went up on Panels and got a great reception: retweets, comments, Facebook shares!. It’s called “I Expected Batman and Robin, Not Pornography” and it’s just a little rant about people who don’t get the concept of liberal arts education. Go on and click it you like comics, dislike censorship, or just enjoy stories about clueless people or straight up ranting.

Just Another Digital Mandala

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Circles within circles...

Circles within circles…

Here’s your Friday mandala. My hand is a little stiff from filling in all those circles, or I probably would have filled in twice as many circles.

Also today I decorated the top of a disintegrating $10 Ikea table with $7 of patterned duct tape. It looks pretty good, all things considered. Will post a picture when the legs are done. It’s in the 110 degree range in Tucson, and there was also a chiltepin pepper plant to repot. I didn’t want to melt before that was taken care of. I actually wanted to draw a comic, but we had an impromptu pool party and I didn’t get to work until almost midnight.

 

The Perfect Passion Flower

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This is Cthulhu's favorite flower.

This is Cthulhu’s favorite flower.

Wow! This design took forever! And it’s complete at last. In retrospect, maybe it didn’t need to be quite so complex; a lot of the detail gets lost at the resolution at which it will be viewed. It’s weirdly, uncomfortably humid here, which made it hard to focus on work. Maybe I could have finished this yesterday if it hadn’t been so sticky.  But here it is: the perfect passion flower.

You can acquire the perfect passion flower in my shop on T-shirts, tank tops, and more. There are even some totally new product types, including a pencil skirt, and a drawstring bag.

Working on this digital painting made me consider the 5 day a week publishing schedule. Obviously, I had nothing to post on Tuesday. I was so focused on trying to get through this piece that I didn’t even have a chance to scan and write about an old piece. And while I do enjoy doing the comic, I miss the opportunity to throw myself into larger projects. Is 3 a week the best option? Would 2 be better, or even 1? Still pondering. But this is what has occupied my attention for the last week or so.

 

 

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.

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.

Dragon Comics 90

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In other words, you paint your own world.

In other words, you paint your own world.

If you haven’t read it already, stop reading at the end of this sentence, go read this Toni Morrison article about what artists do in times of dread, and then come back. Obviously, I can’t say anything as well as Toni Morrison. (But if you’re a rebel who doesn’t follow directions, I can summarize: When the worst things are happening, this is when it is most important for artists to express themselves.)

It’s easy, especially for creatives, to become overwhelmed with sorry, and even with anger, but feelings don’t make a difference. Actions do. We may feel impotent, immobile in the face of forces that seem much larger than our individual strength, but every small voice counts against injustice. If something upsets you, something that feels fundamentally wrong, don’t despair. Say something. Write something. Paint something. Don’t let the enormity of the task overwhelm you. You are not alone. Someone is listening. Someone needs to hear what you have to say.

This comic is for the real kitty and bunny, who sometimes get angry or depressed about the meanness that runs through humanity and frustrated by the feeling that fixing the problem is out of their control. It’s true that all the Problems of the World cannot be solved by one person, but many of the problems of the world can be solved be individuals and small groups. Sometimes just saying the right thing at the right time to the right person is enough to effect a change, to raise up one more spark of the divinity of kindness to light the world.

That’s why I have to keep reminding myself never to harden my heart, and to always answer hatred with love (and also why I can never read the comment forums). I have to be ready with the right answer when the moment presents itself, whether that’s drawing a ridiculous comic in support of a doctrine of love, or speaking up when I hear an ugly microaggression being casually spewed. I mean, I’m not perfect (sometimes I do read the comment forums) but I always feel better with an open heart. I always feel better when I choose to see the light instead of set my mind to the darkness.

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 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 Comics 81

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Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I'm wistening fow the voice of inspiwation.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I’m wistening cwosewy fow the sweet sweet voice of inspiwation.

 

When we were kids, my brother was considered something of a math prodigy. He skipped the 9th grade to attend the Illinois Math and Science Academy and taught at the University of Illinois before he even finished his BA. While he was in college, he told me, laughingly, Paul Erdős’s statement about mathematicians being machines that turn coffee into theorems.

My brother went on to earn advanced degrees from some of the most prestigious schools in the world. On a recent visit, I mentioned that quote to him and he laughed, this time a little bitterly. He said that most mathematicians do their best work before they’re 25, and that if you haven’t had any brilliant and original thoughts in the field before 30, you’re not likely to, ever. It’s like your brain has lost same particular aspect of plasticity that allows it to uncover new truths about numbers.

That’s never been so of writers. It’s the rare author who has both a mastery of craft as well as an interesting story to tell before 30. Maybe authors don’t hit their stride until 40. It’s not at all unusual to come across an extremely talented person who didn’t even start writing until they had retired in their 60s. So age is actually an asset in this field. And I keep telling myself that. It’s not only the facility with words and the understanding of how to structure sentences, chapters, paragraphs, and stories. It’s also the vast increase in life experience: fodder to create stories. And this increases exponentially. I don’t only gain the experience of my own life. I also get the experiences of all the people I talk to, and all the characters in books I read and videos I watch.

There’s absolutely no reason for a person to feel as if they haven’t achieved enough. In the creative arts, your masterwork can still be in the future.

 

Dragon Comics 73

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Choose your friends wisely.

Choose your friends wisely.

This is part of the child mind, the beginner mind, to approach the task with a sense of innate wonder. Every time, there exists a moment of awe and a feeling of newness, a joy in the process and another at the outcome. It doesn’t matter what anyone outside of that experience thinks, and anyone inside the experience will witness it with the same breathe of amazement. What comes after, when the internal, made external, moves through the rest of the world, does not change these sensations.

What comes after, when the world passes judgement, has no impact on the artist or the creative process.

Another night when I started too late and my head has gone all swimmy such that the screen is blurry. Comic: that’s all.