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.
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.
Got 3000 words written today, and hope to get another 1000 before bed. Also finished reading Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, which is among the most delightful instructional manuals I’ve ever read. Eisner had an intricate understanding of not only drawing and writing, but of human psychology, and this last was effective to two ends: it allowed him to tell compelling stories about believable people (even if those people were caricatures of regular people, or more amazing than regular people), and it allowed him to tell those stories in such a way that readers remained interested in the work.
Eisner’s “Contract” with the Reader
Above is one of my favorite panels from this book, illustrating the contract with the reader: the artist may safely assume that the reader lives in the same reality and shares many of the same basic understandings of the world. This allows the art to work as a form of shorthand: i.e., you don’t need to explain to your reader that a coconut released from a tree will descend in the direction of the earth’s core, or that coconuts grow on trees, or that trees drop seeds.
This book has vast quantities of things to recommend it, and even if you’re not interested in drawing or writing or storytelling or human psychology, some of the reprints will certainly be worth your time: Eisner’s beautiful new ending to Franz Kafka’s bleak The Trial, and an example of “compression” by R. Sikoryak comprising Dante’s Inferno retold in 10 Bazooka Joe comics were my favorites.
If you’re here for my art, and particularly if you’re here for my dragons, never fear. I’ve got a couple of compelling characters for you right here:
Sophia Violetta Regalia, a heraldic dragon
Obviously, there need to be as many, if not more, girl dragons than boy dragons.
Pentalara, a serpentine dragon who could probably benefit from some orthodontia, if she could find an orthodontist willing to work on a dragon’s mouth.
These lovely ladies certain exude personality.
Living alone, incursions into the writing space were few and far between, but with a family it can be hard to find those broad, uninterrupted swaths of time in which to think of nothing but art. For the last couple years, I’ve had to rely on writing retreats, some taken solo, and some taken with other like-minded artists. Today, I’m on retreat in Flagstaff, working on a new book, and it may not come as a surprise that I’ve decided to try my hand at the graphic novel medium.
Three useful texts
Lacking the time or money for a low-res MFA in graphic storytelling, I’ve been reading voraciously on the subject. The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil has by far been the most useful resource on the subject, answering many questions about how to draft a script, and how words and images relate to one another in this format. Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics is massive and detailed, offering excellent advice for artists. I’m still working on the Will Eisner book; although I’ve not got very far into it, it definitely offers a very different perspective and set of advice. Eisner basically invented the modern graphic novel format.
The Stan Lee book is probably most useful to those who have already learned quite a bit about figure, landscape, and perspective, and just want to know how to translate that into drawing Marvel-style comics. I’m still looking for some old copies of the books that everyone seems to recommend for those wishing to learn more about figure drawing, which are any of the “Dynamic” drawing books written by Burne Hogarth. I could order them from Amazon, but I have $125 credit at a local used book chain, and I’m still hoping to find what I want there, since their stock always changes.
One useful piece of advice from the DC book involves the use of “suggested layout” sketches, normally visual notes from the writer to the artist. While I do intend to do my own penciling, the idea of generating storyboards seems a good way to communicate to myself (the artist) in the future, while visualizing the book to myself (the writer) in the present. These panel mockups may change, but presently, they correspond with the script, which is divided, per Dennis O’Neil’s advice, into pages and panels.
Suggested layouts corresponding to the script
Comics tend to start on the recto, or right hand page. My pages are marked R and L so I can keep rector and verso (left hand page) straight and ensure that 2-page spreads or splash pages, and pages where deliberate mirroring (pages 9 and 10 above) will actually be printed facing one another.
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.
This is a photocopy of the original, of course.
Totally forgot about these: my first-ever art commission! I think I made $25 for these 2 drawings in 1993. The situation was similar to the one with the Javelina Happi Coat: I had randomly shown a woman some of my sketches and she offered to pay me money to draw something she wanted drawn. I forget where the originals came from, but she specifically wanted these particular dragons, and I specifically wanted $25, so it worked out well.
A little worse for wear…
Wonder what became of them. Do they still exist? I recall they were to be given as gifts. Did the recipient treasure them?
There will be some newer stuff this week, although my dark cloud of “at least it will be over Monday” has been extended to “at least it will be over Wednesday.” In reality, it’s one of those things that will never be over. But this phase will. I hope. Anyway, my stepdaughter and I went to the elementary school and started a back-to-school bulletin board (my district goes back July 31, if you can believe it!). So there’s that.
No matter how I try, I will never draw people like Frank Frazetta or Burne Hogarth (sob) (but I keep trying) and similarly, I’ll never draw dragons like Michael Whelan or Donato Giancola (seriously, love the hyperrealism). I may never even learn how to paint, because painting is a fairly expensive hobby, and this experiment is acquainting me with fairly impoverished circumstances.
This dragon is pretty metal, all right. You can see through the page; when I started this project, I was using recycled paper.
At the same time I started drawing mandalas, I also started dragons that allowed me to let go of my preconceived notion of what dragons had to be. This series imagines a wide range of dragons, and most of them are very distant cousins to the dragons you know from modern fantasy art. They’re not quite cartoons; although some of them are funny, they’re pretty serious in their own right.
Ragtop was snorkeling Scotland’s lochs before you ever heard of them.
Unlike the dragons I labored over in adolescence, these dragons aren’t trying to make the covers of obscure trade paperbacks or adorn the walls of adolescent boys’ bedrooms. They’re just going about their dragony existences, unconcerned with how glamorous they appear in comparison to their more popular cousins.
This is a case where drawing a mandala really did serve primarily as a centering exercise.
It’s not easy to get me angry, but when there’s something to get really angry about, my brain gets obsessive. My husband and I received some upsetting news the day before we were scheduled to go down to Florida to visit my grandparents, and we agreed that we wouldn’t talk about it until we got back. Of course, we were both thinking about it the entire time. When we returned, we both had to deal with the situation, which I did by writing a 2000 word email. It took about 2 hours. The words had been brewing and stewing in my brain all week, and by the time I finished, I was in a massive state of agitation. Drawing this mandala helped me regain my composure. I deliberately used rainbow colors to lift my mood, although the skewing of the pattern shows to me how off-kilter I was at the time.
qwertyvsdvorak 