Tag Archives: drawing

Purple Classic Mandala

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Around and around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.

If I focus only on the good stuff, it’s hard not to be optimistic. Not only did I manage to convert 1/4 of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters into comic format in a single week, the comics were well-received in literary circles. Two professors told me that they intend to teach the comics with the book in the upcoming year, and Bonnie Jo is already talking to a printer about having the comic printed and bound as a comic book, to take on her paperback tour this fall. There are some other good things that could materialize from this, too.

Plus, just on the strength of the story of how I came to create these comics, another author who I greatly admire has stated that she wants to work with me to create a couple graphic versions of her stories for her next book. (Maybe I can name names when the project has a little more behind it than a single conversation, but it seems fairly likely that it will go forward. I suggested the writer scrutinize my work more closely to ensure that my style would jibe with theirs, and was told, “I feel this in my body,” i.e., she didn’t care what they looked like, she just knew she wanted to work with me.) There was a lot of synchronicity going on that day.

I had to tell the Rabbit that she was correct; putting The Hermit into the Kindle store was the right idea. In the fall, there will be  dead tree version, and it will most likely have quotes from several well-known and successful authors on the back cover.

Candy Delight Mandala

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Delicious and nutritious. Tastes just like chicken. OK, just like chicks. Well, actually, like marshmallow Peeps.

Today I had some very intensive conversations, one with the Rabbit and one with Misses Kitty, on the subject of marketing for artists. I have a fair amount of experience in marketing for other people. It was a huge component of my last real job, and I worked closely with the marketing people when I was in traditional publishing, but I never enjoyed it, or excelled at it. The Rabbit and Misses Kitty are sort of better at it than I am. But I’m supposed to try.

After all, the Owl, whose book coming out really soon, sold her house, bought a van, and swore to spend the entire year on a publicity tour. That’s a real commitment. And what have I done? Made some posts on social media? My books are good. I’m a good writer. But beyond that, the process loses my interest.

Also today I finished reading my next big novel to The Man (I have a slender kids’ book that will come out later this year, but it’s actually older than The Hermit.) This next book is science-fiction-y, and murder-mystery-y, and dystopian-y. It’s also about 800 pages. For quite some time I puzzled over how to cut it down to a manageable level, but the people who’ve read it don’t seem to think it needs cutting down. Still, it needs some editorial work. In reading it to The Man (800 pages, which took about 5 weeks) I found dozens of typos and a number of continuity errors and things like that. After this next book is published, and I have participated in some marketing-related activities, I will make about 2 more passes and then maybe start the entire agent-seeking process all over again. If I can actually sell some copies of The Hermit before then, it will help.

Now I’m writing a horror novel; it’s a genre I’ve barely touched on in my life, even though I read everything Stephen King wrote prior to 1996 and some of the stuff he wrote after it, and all of Clive Barker’s early stuff, and HP Lovecraft and other writers in that vein. I know I can write a novel; it remains to seen whether I can be scary.

Not that I’m scaring anyone with a crayon mandala in cotton candy pink and marshmallow Peep yellow. And I guess those are blue M&Ms and the green are those weird sour candies that kids like today. They didn’t have them in the ’80s, as far as I can remember, so I never got a taste for them.

You know what would help, though? You could buy my book, support my Patreon,  or order my merch.

Proud Mama Dragon

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Usually I name my crayon dragons on the drawing. I think this one’s name is Kissa. Should have put her name into the flames, actually.

Wrote  a script for a comic that had been blooming in my mind for a few days and then started to second-guess myself and decided to check my sources, so to speak, before drawing it. Certain recent events weigh heavily. Anyway, I couldn’t have done justice to the subject matter in the time available.

Instead, I settled on something I used to do all the time, and haven’t done in a while: dragons in crayon. And still, you would not believe the tribulation. I wanted to sit on the floor, but had to adjust the lamp to shine on my workspace. But somehow, I knocked the lamp over, breaking the bulb. Fortunately, although it cracked and no longer emitted light, it stayed in basically one piece and was easy to remove.

Then I went to the closet and got another bulb, but it was so well-packaged that I had difficulty getting it out of the protective packaging. Eventually, I dismantled the entire box, but the bulb was still secured in the cardboard. So I gave it another tug, and it went flying across the floor, shattering into a million pieces. Now I had to get another bulb and install that just so I could see well enough to sweep and vacuum the broken glass in order to safely sit on the floor. Probably end up mad as a hatter anyway.

Finally, I was able to draw this majestic mother dragon guarding her precious egg atop a golden hoard. Classic.

Per usual, I would be eternally grateful if you considered supporting QWERTYvsDvorak by buying my book, supporting my Patreon, or ordering my merch.

Stigma and Anthers

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Macrophotography of flowers on days equal parts scorching and windy in the high desert. Click here to embiggen.

One of the top shots from Sunday’s drive over Mount Graham. Been wanting to photograph this plant for a while: it’s the desert poppy, a showy white blossom that stands on a tall stalk and develops a thistle-like pod when the petals fall off. As I mentioned yesterday, they’re ubiquitous in the high desert, but I live in the low desert and only see them on road trips.

All day long I was thinking of various comics a person could draw about life, stuff about kids and summertime and introversion. Normal comic fodder. But my brain was on a short fuse all day, and just before dinner, when I went to get the mail and found we had received a single letter, from a medical facility threatening to send us to collections despite the fact that we made 3 separate attempts to pay the bill in the last 3 weeks and their billing department was apparently not competent enough to do something as complex as run a credit card or return a phone call, and my head basically exploded. I didn’t even make an effort after that; feeding the children took all my remaining willpower and I knew there was no chance of accomplishing anything else.

On the plus side, The Man fixed the problems I was having with the Wacom tablet/Photoshop for the last 3 months. I spend weeks with tech support working on the issue and never got anywhere close to figuring out the problem. The Man fixed it in 5 minutes. “Oh, CAD has that feature,” he said, once he understood the problem and considered possible solutions. He also fixed the scanner, which stopped working thanks to my implementing the aforementioned tech support’s unhelpful suggestions. So we’re back in business. If only the artist were competent to write and draw today.

The Fox invited me to a writing party tomorrow (yes, I know that’s a drawing party, but it’s a metaphor and the same basic concept). Maybe I can write and draw in the same day.

Big, Hexy Mandala

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You just have to visualize the parts that don’t fit on the page.

There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed around my comics, which is that, typically, if I’m really pleased with one and certain that it’s funny, and happy that I managed to draw exactly what I wanted to draw, and satisfied that I’ve really produced something worth my time, it will get 12 hits and someone on Reddit will say something rude about it. On the other hand, if I’m uncertain about whether it makes any sense and I feel like the art is confusing or lazy and it’s far from my best work, that’s the comic that gets 112 upvotes and 50 Facebook shares and reposted on the Cheezburger Network.

Last week I drew 3 comics, and 2 of them bombed utterly and I know they were funny. The one that got a lot of likes was one of those comics where I could sort of visualize the punchline but didn’t have the exact phrasing for it until the last second, and was never really happy about the impact of that last line, but time was up and I had to stand with what I had so far.

Sometimes I tinker with the idea of only writing stuff that I don’t like, because obviously, it would perform better. That’s how it was when I was writing for money, too. If I threw my heart into something and tried to make it really special and well-written, the client would hate it and want a million changes until it sucked, and then they’d be happy. If I phoned it in, scrawling some shit on a napkin at the last second and didn’t bother to try to make it good in any way, the client would be ecstatically pleased and tell me what a great writer I was and how they wished they could afford to pay me more.

I can only conclude that people have no taste. Or else I don’t.

 

 

The Art of Negotiation

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Don’t knock cauliflower crust pizza until you try it. It’s pretty good! And yes, it has to be a Mexican Coke. And yes, I can taste the difference. So no funny business. No Pepsi. No Tab. And definitely no high fructose corn syrup. 

Today’s comic is a bit of a shout out to Joe Martin, one of the great old-school newspaper comic strip artists, a dude who has been writing not one, not two, not three, but FOUR dailies for something like the last 38 years. (He apparently got married at 16 and had a passel of kids, so it was probably a survival/escape mechanism.) His wikipedia page is a bit threadbare, but his website claims that the Guinness Book has awarded him the designation of the world’s most prolific cartoonist, having published well over 20,000 gags. Mind-bogglingly, he is still funny after almost 4 decades at it.

He does a periodic bit about his “Uncle Leon” and what the world would be like if this out-of-touch relative held a variety of professional and historical positions. I’m pretty sure that’s where this comic came from, except that I am probably a little weirder. Like Uncle Leon, I am wholly unsuited to a wide variety of professions, but, unlike Uncle Leon, I think I’m aware of my shortcomings and could at least fake it for a while before people caught on.

I’m pretty pleased with this stereotypical looking police detective and his skewed tie. There are a couple details I couldn’t iron out, like the right side of his collar and the specifics of how men’s mustaches go gray, but by and large, he actually looks like the caricature I was trying to draw. It’s weird how the solution to little issues seems so simple once the comic is published when they’re impossible in Photoshop and I’ve erased and redrawn them 50 times. But I am the queen of second guessing myself. Dragon came out fine, although I don’t usually draw my body so skinny or angular. For a really long time, when I started cartooning, I was always trying to draw the whole body of every character, but obviously, in many cases, you only need the top part.

In the future, It would probably behoove me to start drawing backgrounds, too, but I’m still learning. But getting to the point where I can always get the idea down and I don’t need a jillion reference photos to figure out how the human body goes together. I want to develop a more cartoony style, and you can’t do that if you’re always dependent on photographs.

Buzzy Bee Mandala

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Bees: not shy about anything at all. 

I very much like bees. That is all there is to say about that. The colors are nice too.

Been working on a longer comic all week. Took quite a while to nail the script down and hours to do the lettering, even though the original idea was about two sentences long. It needed fleshing out. I typically do the lettering first, but not always; the tighter the artwork needs to be, the more important it is to get the words in beforehand, or you might end up without enough space for the text. The artwork is going to be pretty complicated, because I need to draw a lot of famous people, and obviously, it’s harder to draw famous people because they have to be recognizable as specific humans rather than just being circles with dots for eyes and a parenthesis for a mouth.

It’s a funny, one, too. I hope. I’ve never done a funny one this complicated.

So I should probably go work on it instead of on this, since hardly anyone ever reads this blog on Mondays anyway.

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.

Dragon Comics 116

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The pencil is mightier than the fang.

The pencil is mightier than the fang.

Usually, I like to think of myself as a pretty calm and thoughtful dragon, but sometimes, lately, for example, the little foibles of humanity can enrage me. I was seriously screaming at clueless drivers who were completely innocent of the rules of the road, especially those pertaining to the 4-way stop, and one car in particular not only almost caused an accident, then made 2 turns and a lane change without signaling. The driver remained blithely unaware of the mayhem he left in his wake.

It’s rare that someone dates to disrespect me to my face, though. Not since the late ’80s, anyway. Usually, if anyone tries, I cut them right down because I’m proactive like that. Every so often, for political reasons, I find it more prudent to smile and pretend. And then stew. And then make them a low level villain in a novel. Anyway, I think this comic helps.

The greatest thing you can do to someone who is rude to you is kill them with kindness. Smile and give them a big hug whenever you walk by. Call out their name and wave if they unexpectedly enter the room.

Or, you can draw a hilarious caricature of them and pass it around to people sympathetic to your cause.

In the end, dragons stay dragons. And vulgar, constipated people stay vulgar, constipated people. Eventually, most people work out which is which.

Two Versions

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Is a picture really worth 1000 words?

Is a picture really worth 1000 words?

Usually the words come before the images, and this comic was no different. When I start drawing, sometimes I put the words into the file first, just so I could see how much space they would take up, but for this comic, there weren’t that many words, and I was feeling very out of sorts, so I wanted to get the more complicated part out of the way before I lost my eye hand coordination and ability to focus. So, I saved the dialog for later, and once I had the black and white outlines I started to wonder if it could be equally, or possibly even more entertaining, as a silent comic.

Here’s the textual version:

...aaaaannnddd, the snake is back again...

…aaaaannnddd, the snake is back again…

Yeah, neither of them are as entertaining as the actual idea I really couldn’t draw because I was too tired to even imagine Legolas as a rhinoceros (OK, no, that wasn’t the gag, but it’s a similar type of a problem) but this is the thing I created today.

At least I received both a request to reprint my article about refugees and comic (my 2nd reprint request this year) plus I found out that I have been put on the media list for Tucson Comicon. Finally! I will fulfill a lifelong dream: employing a press pass to get into an event I want to attend without paying for a ticket. Whee! My writing is really paying off. Also, I’m going to Comicon.