Tag Archives: mandala

Queen of Hearts Mandala

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Off with her head. Off with all their heads.

I’m starting to suspect that posting mandalas actually decreases the traffic on my blog, but goddamnit I have all these freaking mandalas and they need to be uploaded and I’m going to post them on the Internet. So there.

In other news, I read that the standard style book is changing and “Internet” will no longer be capitalized come this summer. That makes zero sense to me. That’s like saying that we’re going to stop capitalizing “America” or “Europe.” The Internet is like its own country and deserves to be a proper noun. Sigh. /end nerd rant.

This weekend was a wreck. I’ve been sick all week. I thought it was just a combination of allergies and the residual stress of my bullshit nightmare journey at the beginning of the month, but The Man, who also thought it was just allergies, has had all the same symptoms, but 2 days in advance of mine, so clearly he caught a weird cold and then gave it to me. And I’ve probably given it to everyone I’ve hung out with since I got back, because our friends are all pretty casual and we sharing drinking vessels and other things that touch your face. Sorry guys. It’s really just a mild cold. But still annoying.

Also, it rained all weekend, which is just completely ridiculous. I didn’t move to the goddamn desert to watch it rain constantly. On the plus side, in 50 years when the entire east coast is under water, climate change may very well turn the desert verdant and arable. If the Big One hits California and it falls into the ocean, Arizona could be the next Garden of Eden. Still, it wasn’t what my brain needed.

I’m writing a sad comic for Tuesday. It’s about my life.

Sunflake Mandala

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Enjoy this one before it melts. 

The Fox and the Otter are getting married tomorrow! And the Dragon is officiating the ceremony, as is only proper, since the Fox officiated the ceremony when the Dragon married The Man. That probably gives the Fox and the Dragon a special bond, since he married me and I married him in the process of each of us marrying other people. Anyway, I’ve been working on the ceremony since my return from the nightmare journey, and I’m afraid I’m second guessing myself all the way. I read the latest draft to the Rabbit, who seemed to approve, but the Fox and the Otter want to be surprised.

I mean, they’re going to be surprised no matter what. But I assume they would like to be pleasantly surprised, rather than otherwise.

I wrote the ceremony and officiated the wedding when the Misseses Kitty got married, too, but they worked with me on the ceremony and approved the draft beforehand. All I have this time is a page of suggestions and the grooms’ assurance that they trust me to do it right. Anyway, I want to make this one perfect, too, and it makes me nervous not to have workshop, even though the Otter said he knew he’d be thrilled with whatever I wrote.

Easing back into more formal writing is good. Blogging and journaling are effective for what they are, but they don’t require the same sort of cohesion, weight, or order as the kind of writing I used to do every day.

After this wedding, my life will return very briefly to normal before The Man and I have to jet off to California for more family stuff. I guess real life is a process of having to jet off when you want to be still. And being still when you want to jet off.

Three Days Ago’s Mandala, Today

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Play with your vegetables.

This week began with best intentions but even though the mandala was scanned weeks ago and I started a comic on Friday, somehow the time slipped out and the first never got posted and the second never got finished and THEN I lost 2 days of my life to circumstances best forgotten but permanently scarring, and they weren’t even the worst 2 days of this month.

Do you think it’s possible for a human brain to forget how to sleep? Because I’m starting to wonder.

It makes one much less effective, and there is really a lot to do around here.

This is really, as you may have guessed, The Asparagus Mandala. It seems like the original intention was to create an assortment of vegetable but after the asparagus I just couldn’t stop laughing and didn’t want to mess with perfection.

In case anyone wondered, QvD still exists as a daily blog. Just a little blip there.

Perfectly Pink Flower Mandala

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It’s a mutant plumeria, or something.

It’s been a rough month in Dragon’s Cave. The deadly beast insomnia (second only to gravity in the “keeping-Dragon-down” pantheon) keeps rearing its ugly head, which can be kind of debilitating. On the plus side, I have beaten my own personal record for most consecutive hours of consciousness. The previous record was 36, in which time I took 2 cars, 2 planes, and 4 trains from Chicago to Prague. This weekend, all I did was travel to and from the town of Bisbee, attend a late night stand up comedy show at an underground club, and fail, repeatedly, to fall asleep.

Picture me, hour 39, in the front row of a club hazy with the green-tinged atmosphere of a Dutch coffee shop, looking up, as if from the bottom of the ocean, at this big black comedian who’s explaining to the organizers of a local Pride Parade that Chik-Fil-A is so good that he doesn’t care if the organization is homophobic, that he would eat Chik-Fil-A if they were openly racist and made him sit in a black-only segregated area of the restaurant, while the civil rights lawyer on my right side is actively booing him. What am I doing here? I ask myself. Is this really happening? Also, if I stand up to go to the bathroom, how likely is it that I will fall over and injure myself? How am I going to get out of this club, anyway? Will I have to walk? Am I actually already asleep and having a weird meta dream about insomnia? And so on.

Round about hour 41, my brain finally relented and I got 9 hours of unconsciousness (not uninterrupted, as The Man got up and made a smoothie halfway through). I bet I could have slept another 2 hours at least, but also there are the kids, and when you’re a kid, “being quiet” and “banging the door of the front-loading washer 17 times in a row” are somehow not mutually exclusive activities. But you can’t make up lost sleep, can you? Like, I should have slept 16 hours, right? Not an option. So, I’m not wholly recovered. I may never be.

Here’s a pinky-pinky flower mandala with an unusual symmetry based on the number 7, drawn in less stressful and more well-rested times.

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.

 

 

So Fancy Mandala

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Put that on your hair ornament and wear it. 

There’s a nice string of pretty fancy mandalas coming up. I must have had a great run of calm focus and serenity a couple years ago. Trying to remember what that’s like.

I thought I’d start a Tumblr to promote my blog, but not that I’ve poked around Tumblr, I realize that I should have just started the blog on Tumblr. Oh, well. Too late now. Still, having your own website is useful, too. Twenty-six dollars a year isn’t that much.

It’s full-on springtime, edging into summer, around here. Winter usually breaks by mid-February around here, but still. This el nino global warming weather is getting ridiculous. The man commenced to showering outside in the unheated garden shower last week. Anyway, with springtime in the desert comes an explosion of wildflowers, which inspire a lot of macrophotography. You can see some of it on Imgur: here’s a tiny fleabane wearing a tiny insect as a hat, and here’s a red poppy stamen.

That’s about it for art this weekend, although I scripted some comics. Not really feeling the Wacom tablet right now. Maybe it’s time to switch to pencil and paper.

 

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.

Fruit Salad Mandala

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Grapefruits and cherries. They’re grapefruit and cherries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I have this dilemma regarding how political I want to go; in the last week, I’ve been involved in a few really interesting conversations about democratic socialism starting with randomly telling the Girl about FDR and the WPA. Then I made a throwaway comment–a joke, really–on someone’s Facebook page, and a mutual friend who I think is actually a poly sci prof or something like that challenged me to define socialism.

Man, I was actually afraid. Who wants to get spanked online by a guy who’s probably 10 years their junior but way further ahead in his career? I almost just copied the entry from the giant OED in my desk. (Aw, hell, who I am kidding? I just love pulling that thing out of my desk. It weighs about 50 pounds and comes with this crazy hemisphere magnifying glass.) But then I thought about what the word meant to me and wrote something kind of thoughtful and intelligent that wasn’t exactly about what “socialism” means, but about what it means to individuals, what it could mean under certain circumstances. And more-successful-than me professor guy gave it a like.

Anyway, it could also be a comic. It would have been super cool to have it ready now, just in time to kick off caucus season (ug) but those serious comics take the most time to lay out and I was getting punched in the guy by my monthly dudebro and also The Man had to play a klezmer concert for a mock Jewish wedding at a Hebrew school north of here, and that sounded more interesting than not attending a klezmer concert for a mock Jewish wedding. Maybe I can do it tomorrow. Although I might have a tattoo consultation tomorrow.

So many comics to read and write!

Amusing anecdote about people who don’t understand socialism:

In 2002 or 2003 I was standing in this interminable line at the Walgreen’s pharmacy counter. I don’t even think I was getting my own medication; it seems to me that I was picking something up for a friend, and this line was WAY past the toothpaste and didn’t seem to be moving at all. And there was a guy in front of–old white guy wispy white hair and a fierce voice–and he had opinions. Lots and lots of opinions.

Well, complaints, really. His medications were so expensive. His doctors were so expensive. He was getting ripped off on all his pills. Everyone was profiting off his misery. It was just terrible, terrible, everything cost so much, medical care cost so much money. This dude was telling me (well, everyone in the vicinity, but I was the person behind him so I was the most trapped) about how much his healthcare cost for like 10 minutes.

Finally he took a breath for air and looked at me expectantly.

“That’s why we need socialized medicine,” I said.

“Well, YOU’RE a COMMUNIST,” he replied, disgusted, and mercifully turned his back on me and shut up.

People are unclear on the concept.

Green Machine Mandala

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I love it when a mandala comes together.

This is pretty sharp mandala, good symmetry, complexity, and layers. It’s based on a principle of 12, which gives it a powerful foundation. There’s so much repetition and less variation. It’s easier to not make a mistake in proportions, especially when you’re mostly dealing with triangles all going the right way. It looks complicated, but it’s actually a little easier than some mandalas with fewer layers.

If I am a green machine, I am a worn down one that requires recharging. Friday and Saturday night were each strenuous in their own ways, and it catches up, even though today all I did was write an article about Lost Girls and cook and clean. There is a bit of a comic in my head but it would be funnier if the joke were expanded, although it could still work in a simple form.

Someone else told me how much they loved the Rapunzel comic from last week. Everyone I know personally who read it thought it was hilarious, but strangers on the Internet didn’t seem impressed. However, my David Bowie tribute was randomly trending somewhere for almost 24 hours Saturday and Sunday so traffic was up all weekend.

No more art news. Only sleepytime news.