Tag Archives: rabbit

Dark Nights on Planet Earth

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Who wants to buy me a plasma cutter so I can do this sort of thing in metal?

Well,  I’m in love with this style of paper cutting, except, obviously, it would work even better in metal. It’s weird that I’ve never even attempted anything like this before; was actually way easier than I thought, probably the only bulletin board I’ve ever done that actually took less time than I’d estimated. The whole thing still took 12 hours over 3 days, but cutting out the details (with a scalpel) didn’t take much longer than sketching them out.

You can view some process pictures on my Instagram feed if you want to see that, along with some closer imagers of each design.

The quote is slightly messed up, probably because I never sleep as much as I need to. There should be another definite determiner between “in” and “contrast.” Still, pretty good stuff. Some kid will probably rip some of the details; they’re very fine and I wasn’t able to hit every spot with glue. It’s too tempting for the littles. After the break, I’ll go back and secure it a bit more.

Speaking of the break, I’m grateful that I didn’t have to get anywhere near an airport this week.

Dragon Comics 148

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Seriously, you *never* hear people talking about goodwill in the spring or summer. 

It’s not my holiday, and I’ve never understood it. For most of my life, Christmas comprised a glorious chunk of time in which everybody left me alone long enough to focus on whatever consumed me in that moment. The few years of my adulthood I was invited/persuaded to participate in some sort of seasonal celebration I felt like a martian.

Well, even more of martian than usual.

In panel 4, I guess I was going for some kind of tannenbaum/dreidel mashup. The tree came out well and it deserved a little spotlight attention.

Cut Paper Creatures on Cards

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For when you want to sit on something soft as a bunny.

Been so caught up in comic and scrambling to figure out what to do when life leaves little time for comics that my RedBubble shop has been totally neglected. This week I also made 2 greeting cards in similar styles with different subjects for very different occasions. Giving art away is great, because it leaves you room to make more art, and with the flatbed scanner, I need never leave a new design behind. That is to say, these 2 new animal images are now available on a wide variety of fine products in my shop.

First, we have Bunnies in the Clover, in green and pink. An assortment of rabbit silhouettes meander around the cool green meadow. They look pretty adorable on this pillow, although the square products cut off designs sized for T-shirts. You can see the entire design in this print.

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A rectangle of rabbits reside on this range

You can get it in its original card format, or as a sticker, or a pair of leggings, or a drawstring bag. There’s something like 37 products now, including clothing, home decor, and, print products.

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Feeling foxy?

The second designs features a woodland creature that would happily eat the bunnies depicted in the first design. It’s the Fox in Clover, and you can see how it strikes you as a pillow, a pencil skirt, an iPad case, a poster, and plenty of other fun products.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing this week in addition to all the stuff I normally do.

Tomorrow will be a more productive day.

 

Dragon Comics 76

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It's like deciding to ignore your lungs's need for oxygen.

It’s like deciding to ignore your lungs’s need for oxygen.

You know how you sometimes have these eye-opening dreams where everything seems infused with wonder and meaning and there’s some kind of message or idea you want to carry back to the real world but once you wake up and try to explain it to other people, even if you can actually remember the dream in its entirety, you still can’t communicate the deep and sublime feelings that it instilled in you as you slept? It’s like that.

My 2 guest essays ran on Panel.net in the last couple days: the first one is about world-building and the graphic novel Aya, and the second is about reading comic books to a blind person. It seems like people liked them and I will be writing more in the future. Pretty excited about that. I’ve also been trying to keep my book review blog updated. I probably only read about 2 adult books a month, but sometimes I read 10 or 20 kids’ books.

This week I have a bulletin board to create, too. Everything depends on whether I have to serve jury duty, though. Ug. I really believe in democracy and the right to a trial by jury, I just don’t like being personally put out to ensure that it happens. I hate the courthouse and I hate being awakened too early and I hate being bossed around and I hate being forced to sit in merciless plastic chairs in huge rooms packed full of strangers. Jurors should be allowed to serve online. I would be much less uncomfortable if I could watch a trial on my laptop in bed.

Dragon Comics 54

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And we’re back! In retrospect, I guess I meant to come back on Monday, but for some reason I thought I had planned to pick up on Wednesday, so here we are.

When the muse sings, you better shut up and listen.

When the muse sings, you better shut up and listen.

My intention was to draw 5 or 6 comics over my break, but of course, I got sick on Christmas Eve and lost most of that week. At least there are 4 finished. Comic back to the comic after take a week off was sort of surreal. It was necessary to remind myself that yes, I can do this.

Inspiration for short fiction sort of comes at your head all the time. I probably write 2 dozens stories in my mind every week. None of them get written down, or even remembered, most of the time, but stories are everywhere. There are characters; there are situations. With the comic, the characters and situations are, by my own parameters, basically the same, but there have to be a million ways to get to the punchline, even if we always start in more or less the same place.

Pebber nodder is a kind of delicious Danish spice cookie, sort of along the lines of gingerbread, but usually smaller than cookies we eat in America (at least in my experience; I am not an expert on Danish desserts) and typically served (I believe) for Christmas. The real life owl is of Danish extraction, but I don’t know her feelings on pebber nodder. We did not eat cookies in the desert over the holiday, although I have hung out in the desert with the owl, without cookies.

The owl, the fox, and the rabbit are my real life writing group, and we do like to go away together to write in a new place. It’s a good form of inspiration, but of course you can’t depend on retreat for inspiration. You have to be able to create in your natural habitat as well.

Dragon Comics 32

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If we’re using the Andy Kaufman metric, this comic is a complete success because it amuses me.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It's that you might have to clean up your own mess.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It’s that you might have to clean up your own mess.

We’re just taking our meta experiment as far as it can go. The 4-panel layout has some particular limitations in terms of what you can do horizontally and vertically, but it also allows for this perfect setup mocking the passage of time.

Personally, I find time travel to be primarily comedic. I’ve never seen a time travel story that actually made sense, and while I was a big fan of Quantum Leap in its time, a lot of what was going on there was more fantasy than science fiction. There’s an X-Files episode that covers time travel as well, but the storyline has a guy from the future returning to the past to kill the people responsible for discovering time travel, because the knowledge of how to conquer time has made the world a horrible place. Generally speaking, though, time travel stories are ridiculous. Looper, for instance. If you can send people back in time, wouldn’t it made more sense to just send them farther back? Instead of sending back assassins and paying them in precious metal and then forcing them to assassinate themselves and run the risk of them balking at that task, why not just send your targets directly to the Jurassic era and let them be eaten by dinosaurs for free? I know people loved that movie, but I found it completely nonsensical. If I were a criminal and going to break the time travel law anyway, I can think of a million better things to do in the past than kill people.

As for the comic, originally the gag was just going to be that Dragon goes to all this trouble to see the future, only to learn that the future holds no surprises: Dragon will be drawing. But I think having the kids in there adds another dimension: Dragon realizes that jumping ahead to the future means that certain things have been left undone in the interim, and then we get a final zinger when the girl references traveling back in time.

I also like some of the poses I’ve gotten the different characters into. In reality, The Man cannot kneel like that, on account of a sudden and unplanned high-velocity meeting of his knee with a guardrail, which resulted in the metal volume of his patella being somewhat higher than that of a normal human. The rabbit really would wrap her ears around her eyes, if she could, to unsee anxiety producing activity. In panel 2, I guess the fox is jumping off the otter’s back to whack the remains of the shattered 4th wall with the broom. That is what is happening. And I also like the way the otter’s tail wraps around the panel frame for balance. And I’m glad the animals in panel 3 have taken it upon themselves to clean up the mess, so that panel 4 Dragon can draw in a clean environment.

That’s the shocking revelation of adulthood. Whatever it is that you do, you will most likely keep doing it.

Dragon Comics 22

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Remember when you were a kid and your could ignore anything?

Remember when you were a kid and your could ignore anything?

Vampire Bat fits into the scope of this comic, I think, and creates a nice contrast to some of the other characters. I could probably draw a better bat, but I’ve been sick and frankly I don’t even really remember drawing most of this comic, which I apparently did in the middle of the night with a mild fever while watching 3 episodes of The X-Files on Netflix, which I also don’t remember. Thank you subconscious mind. Way to be way more functional than my conscious mind, even if you do keep it all to yourself.

In panel 4, the girl is, of course, rocking out to Taylor Swift. They really do like those big headphones, which are a lot more comfortable than earbuds. As adults, it’s sometimes hard to know how to handle kids and technology. We don’t want them on their devices all the time, but we also don’t want them constantly complaining that they’re bored. We don’t like hearing the random sounds their devices make, but we also don’t like them being completely checked out and unable to hear anything you say to them because they’ve got the headphones on.

 

 

 

 

Dragon Comics 9

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I apologize in advance to any splendid otters who may just randomly stumble upon this comic strip, and also potentially any foxes even though obviously any similarity of these characters to any people/animals/mythical creatures, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Clearly, drawing a comic that is really only a thinly veiled depiction of ones friends and family could be a very dangerous pastime, unless all of ones friends and family have a really great sense of humor. Which, of course, mine do. But still. Purely coincidental.

I drew that otter around 1 a.m., looked at it, and then laughed for about 10 minutes straight.

I drew that otter around 1 a.m., looked at it, and then laughed for about 10 minutes straight.

I definitely do not know any large, muscular, barrel-chested otters. That would be utterly ridiculous.