Tag Archives: mandala

Evolving Mandala

Leave a reply
img015

Everything in its place, and the universe is harmonious. 

It was a good week for QvD. Four consecutive days of excellent traffic, a request from Tony DiGerolamo of The Webcomic Factory and Super Frat to trade links, and the soft launch of my novel, The Hermit, in the Kindle store. I’ll be doing a hard launch with publicity and email blasts and things like that in the future, but if you want to read it now, go ahead. I promise that it’s a much, much better love story than Twilight. And no wussy monsters. My monster is extremely badass. I can’t think of anything else you could do with $4.99 that would provide you with so many hours of pleasure, while going so far to help to prevent me from starving to death. Well, I guess you could support my Patreon, but I won’t expect too much.

I should make some new comic T-shirts. Definitely the drunk painting panel. Probably the charcuterie. Some of the other 1-panel comics, the cover of my book, and that super-cool dragon mandala. Now I have a migraine, though. Please enjoy this mandala that suggests the world is finite, knowable, and in balance.

Old, Rolled Mandala

3 Replies
IMG_2852

Ever have one of those incarnations when you feel like you’re just eating your own tail?

Whilst searching for some other document (never found; can’t even remember what it was now), came across this blast from the past: one my first mandalas. Not sure about the date, but probably from sometime in the mid-’90s, although it could be earlier. Sketching it out was meticulous work; I literally used a compass and a protractor to get all the curves and angles. The center part shows the phases of the moon, and the cardinal points are trees during the 4 seasons.

After putting so much effort into making the sketch perfect, I then became terrified to ruin it by trying to color it, so it just hung out in a tube for 15 or 20 years. No idea how it got stained…the stains are not as bad as they look, but rather amplified due to the Photoshop correction I had to do to the original image just to make the pencil lines clearly visible.

The whole this is pretty banged up, and, of course, held together with scotch tape, but none of that matters anymore, because now I do have Photoshop. I could draw a clean and more perfect copy in a relatively short period of time, and I could color it in a million different ways without ruining the original. Would make a wicked cool T-shirt.

Not that I don’t have 50 other projects.

Pretty in Punk Redux Mandala

Leave a reply
Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 1.34.07 PM

Yes, my scanner is fixed; no, I’m not into rescanning stuff right now. 

Last night found me working feverishly until 2 a.m. to finish a project that’s been rolling around my head for years. There’s a possibility that it will actually be needed soon. Anyway, it came out wonderfully, almost exactly what I’d envisioned in my head, which is the best metric of success when you can’t depend on outside approval for validation.

Yesterday I went to a meet-up for the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America who live in Tucson. I am not a member of the SFWA–I think the criteria for membership is something like 3 professional sales or 6 semi-professional sales, and I only have 2 semi-professional sales–but I received an invitation and damnit, I went. The writers were very cool and inclusive; half of them I already knew, included one with whom I had been conversing on Facebook for over 3 years but had never met face to face (although I did once hear her speak at the Tucson Festival of Books). Even though everyone there had achieve a greater level of professional success than I had, they weren’t really any different from me. None of them thought they had really achieved a great level of professional success. All of them spoke wistfully of writers who had done better. Two of them mentioned that their most successful stories were those that happened to be anthologized in books where their bylines shared space with household names like Stephen King and RL Stine.

It felt good to be part of a writing community again.

This mandala is badly reproduced, but I’m already 14 hours late posting this blog, and I have come to loathe scanning things. It’s worse than photocopying (because it takes longer). It’s ideologically similar to another mandala I drew, so I gave it the same name. This one doesn’t exactly look “like a Hot Topic exploding over an Orange Julius stand at the mall.” It looks like the explosion stayed in the Hot Topic.

Weird Wide Web Mandala

Leave a reply
Screen Shot 2016-05-30 at 1.01.42 AM

Gonna be honest. It’s not my most coherent work.

Originally, we were planning to go camping over Memorial Day weekend, but then we realized we were invited to a wedding, and also that I was supposed to be the photographer for that wedding, so we did the wedding instead. I’ve heard some horror stories from the Vampire Bat about the trials and tribulations of being a wedding photographer, but the brides were pretty laid back about it, and the only one coming remotely close to freaking out about details was Mrs. Kitty, who was the wedding planner. It’s a little nerve-wracking, because wedding picture are a big deal to the people whose wedding it is and it would feel terrible to mess them up. And of course, my camera did jam a few times, probably due to the intense heat, so I was only able to get a single shot of their first kiss even though they were kissing for about 30 seconds. Plus, when I got home, the computer starting seizing up and I was terrified it was going to begin deleting photos (this has happened before) but after an hour of messing with it, things were set to rights. There were some pretty good shots. And I got paid. So all is well. Now I am eating leftover plantains (the wedding was potluck) and trying to think of a comic for tomorrow.

That was my third paying photography gig and people are starting to ask me if I am going to start a sideline business. On the one hand, money. On the other hand, every time you take a hobby you love and start exploiting your talent for money, you have one less hobby you love.

Little Red Rosette

Leave a reply
IMG_1739.png

Baby, you’re much too sweet.

Prince’s death didn’t hit me the way Bowie’s death did, even though I would say I enjoyed the work of both artists about equally. The different, I guess, was that my enjoyment of Prince was more public. Prince covered the airwaves in the ’80s. Everyone was always singing “When Doves Cry” on the playground. Prince felt pop, even though in retrospect I’d say his music had great depth. My experience of Bowie was more private. Labyrinth was a movie about inner worlds that spoke to me internally; The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was an intensely personal experience.

Or maybe I’m just burnt out on watching great talents pass.

But that’s what I drew a David Bowie tribute comic, and all I have for Prince is this pun.

An ex of mine always said that if I were a car, I’d a little red Corvette. Later on, he thought I was just going to hold him back, but in the end he realized he’d made a mistake. It was too late, then, anyway. I guess I was too fast for him after all.

Managed to get some writing in and put together part of a complicated comic with ridiculously complex artwork and too much text that nobody is going to appreciate, and that in a weekend with 2 parties. Starting to feel more hopeful, more full of creative energy, and more focused.

Violet Eyes Are Watching You Mandala

Leave a reply
IMG_1737.png

Look into my eyes. All of them.

Friday’s comic, as readers of my Facebook page probably know, roused the “Reddit Republican army,” which is pretty much the best thing that a blog post can do in terms of reach. It’s received nearly 3,000 hits so far, thanks in part to a group of people whose belief in their own righteousness is so strong that they are willing to publicly come out in favor of bullying elementary students. That’s totally what Jesus would do, right? Mock those who are different and then shout out those who speak up for the oppressed. Thanks for generating sufficient controversy to drive traffic to my often-overlooked page.

Of course, the haters didn’t account for all those page views on their own. It was also one of my most-shared posts on Facebook, and has more Facebook upvotes than anything else I’ve ever done. And more WordPress likes. And it gained me more WordPress followers than any single post in 2 years. I didn’t even think it was that big of a deal. Seriously, who gets up in arms about a picture book that advocates not mocking and bullying people? Oh, yeah. The people who have decided to make their stand on the gender binary. Because that’s crazy important. We already saw what happened once women started wearing pants. Can you imagine what the world would look like if we just let people dress however they wanted? Can you picture a world in which we do not deride and ostracize children who can’t conform?

So: my passions for mocking uptight people who advocate censorship in schools, speaking out against bullying, and fucking the gender binary have joined together to serve me…somehow.

Anyway, my psyche can only take so much criticism, and it’s been a weird weekend. Here’s a funny little purple mandala full of eyeballs. They’re always on you, making sure that you adhere to their preconceived notions of everything you are capable of achieving in life based on the presumed shape of your genitals.

Purple Haze Mandala

Leave a reply
IMG_1735.png

Getting sleepy? Dizzy? Disoriented? Are you sure you don’t feel like lying down? ‘Cause I do.

Apparently, updating my operating system rendered my scanner drivers obsolete, and I can’t even begin to deal with that situation; I still haven’t installed the new Photoshop drivers. I. Can’t. Deal. I don’t even care if my smart house refuses to let me eat junk food and my self-driving car always goes the speed limit; I’ll be very happy when computers can program themselves. You know what you need, computer. Why don’t you just get it and run it yourself? Fortunately, the app that pulls images off my camera came with the OS, so that works at least. I was even able to easily crop the image. So: mandala.

There were myriad other interesting things I intended to write about in this post, but they all seem to have slipped away. It’s midnight. My head hurts. My lungs now seem to require a vast quantity of medicines in order to perform their basic and previously involuntary function. Rather than dropping pithy creative wisdom bombs, I will be sucking on Ventolin with a Nyquil chaser and marathoning  Grace and Frankie until I pass out.

This mandala is fairly pleasing, though, in its wabi sabi way.

Straight Lines and All Mandala

Leave a reply
img065

Every once in a while, I find myself accidentally in balance.

Change is in the air, lifting the wings of a paper crane as it floats over turbulence, rustling the unkempt spikes on a dragon’s back. Mesmerizing. This week, probably. For a lot of years–maybe 7 or so, I should think–the Fox and I kept up a daily correspondence about our creative output in the previous 24 hours. Then I got cranky and disillusioned with the industry and he met and fell in love with the Otter and that all got put on hold for 2 years. Then he married the Otter (I married the Otter and him, because that is something I am totally qualified to do in the state of Arizona, and he had kindly married The Man and me 3 years earlier) and I got my groove back and we have been writing each other emails again. This is very exciting.

Tomorrow I’ve been invited to participate in a panel on gender and sexuality at a near-ish college, and I’m really excited. I think this–adult sex ed–is something I want to get more involved in. I guess I’m suffering from a little chest cold (6 airplane flights in 5 weeks, not surprising) and I’m not feeling like much of a dragon, but I’m determined to put my heart into this, because it’s important to me that young adults see that the world is not 100% heteronormative and cis-gendered, that’s it’s OK to not fit into a false binary, that you can be happy and fabulous without conforming to arbitrary life expectations based on someone else’s perception of your genitals. I was lucky to attend Antioch College, so I heard these messages when I was 17, but even with the Internet, I guess a lot of kids still don’t know that they’re OK.

But if you’re reading this, and your gender and/or sexuality don’t match up with your community’s stereotypes of acceptable outcomes, know that you are OK.

Love Is Real Not Fade Away Mandala

Leave a reply
img063

I didn’t leave it in the window. It started out this pale.

Sunday night as I write this, and I already have scripts for 3 days’ worth of comics, plus a couple cool macros. As The Man and I have another exciting adventure coming up this week (2 more days of airline travel…I shudder to think) and if I can’t get a couple days ahead, I’ll probably accidentally miss half a week like I did the last time I had to endure the tender mercies of the airline industry.

Tonight we counted and I have 900 of my 1000 cranes, which is also exciting. I’m completely out of origami paper, and everyone in town seems to be out of it, which is frustrating, but with only 100 to go, I’ll probably start cutting squares out of random pages.

OK, back to Tuesday’s comic, and maybe Wednesday’s if my brain can stay on that long.