The missing link

Having rushed though *my* obligations this week, I didn't get around to a special coloring of today's strip, which makes it a little harder to grasp. Thus, to make up for that slight, I present to you... UNCLE MIKE IN COLOR! Well, as much color as a white cat can have. The panel I used is from tomorrow's strip (also not in color) so, um, spoiler alert?

Mike being the same color as Joseph goes a long way to proving he's the missing link. Mike's build is also in between the massive Joseph and scrawny Gene, but that didn't come out in the drawing well. (Proportions are hard, kids!) If you can't remember the other fathers in color, here you go:

Hu's your daddy?

With the launch of Copper Road, it's time to nail down the final, puntacular member of the Hu family. Meet Hiram Hu. Hi for short. That name beat how How Hu mostly because Howard Hu is a few letters short of Leonardo DiCaprip saying, "come in with the milk." (The Aviator is one of my favorite movies!)

Now... which one is Hi Hu? I'm not sure yet! You can see the themes I am playing with, but what combination is the one for him? Is it even in the image?

I know I want him to have some faint Siamese traits to him, but more along the line of lavender points, which have light coloring. In Precocious, only Autumn's clone-y family is allowed to be of "pure" breeding. That was half the reason I brought in Wen, even though his two lines might be the only ones he ever gets in Precocious' run. Wen hinted that daddy Hu isn't another pure Siamese. (The other reason for Wen's introduction was, of course, my need to populate Copper Road with a cast of crazies.)

So what traits work? I know I want the ear points, be them half-shade (like Wen) or black tipped (like Tiff's brother, Mikey). I also want the scruffy beard, because Hi isn't the most together person and it gives him a casual look. That less-than-formal look has extended to his hair. For that I took Kaitlyn and Wen's looks and went with several hybrid styles of the two. My original leaning was towards the Kaitlyn side, but the Wen-ish sketches do look good.

Point is, I don't know. I can delay his appearance in Copper Road for a few weeks, letting the idiotastic Shii Ann speak for both when the situation calls for parental failure - Hi's not much better than his wife in the common sense game - but the obsessive world builder in me wants to nail it down soon. Any advice?

A loving family, part 2

Work has started on my first commissioned Precocious painting!

What we have here is a detail of the paint sketch feautring a young Harvey and Deirdre Linkletter adoring a newborn Jacob. If it's too rough to be clear, Deirdre is doing the coochie-coo thing and baby Jacob is giggling. Harvey, like any doting father, is armed with a camera.

The next step is shoring up the figures and solidifying the lines. I'm not content with Harvey's rendering yet, but I assume it'll work out in the end. The giggling Jacob came from an errant brush stroke, but I think it really adds to the piece! (He was originally supposed to be asleep.) Yay happy accidents!

Mercy killing the latest sketchbook

Today was a no energy day, which meant sketching! Because sketching isn't that useful with a pile of work to do! Whatevs. I sketched until I ran out of pages, so here's my tradition "leftovers" sketchbook post!



As with most sketchbooks, this one had its token "I'm still a fine artist!" drawing.



Here's a fun one of Sydney in her aforementioned pikachu PJs! To balance it out, I added an Ivy sketch to make a mommies compilation.



Sometimes I like to give myself a challenge just to keep things interesting. These two sketches are me trying to figure out what Suzette's mother might look out. I have no plans to include Suzette's family in the action at all, I don't have any inclination to assign a name or personality to the woman. I just wanted to reverse engineer to see what genetics would create the girl. The one on the right is clearly better, but is it lame to pull the "almost clone" tactic? Oh well, it's not like Suzette's home life is ever getting shown.

Tomorrow a new sketchbook adventure begins! Motivation to start one tonight: None.

Child Abuse: The Wallpaper

Here's the latest Precocious wallpaper, featuring the Oven family bonding as normal. Isn't it adorable?

Toss your kid in the air day!

See! I haven't forgotten the wallpaper I owe everyone! (Now *you* stop forgetting to vote for Precocious!) The drawing is inked and ready for coloring. (NOT TODAY.) I still need to think of a good tagline for the image. "Good family values"?

Et too, Michelangelo?

Enough about my damn paintings. This blog needs to get back to CARTOON ANIMALS! Family friendly and adorable cartoon animals happily working together. It's like a candy-coated Brad Bird movie!

This was the backup sketch for the Family Webcomics splash art, rejected because it was entirely unclear that they were viewing webcomics on a computer monitor. Hey, they could be a really warped family viewing hard-core pornography - it's just not clear!

I did feel bad about the cutting of two children from the FAMILY art, so I went ahead and inked it. I feel the worst about little Mikey, who was meant to be the primary Et young'un. The only line he's had so far was when he was off-panel, locked away. (And I can't even be certain he's the one speaking.) Most of the time, he's the innocent one who gawks at chaos created by other children. Granted, that's *kinda* his role anyway, but he'll eventually interact more. It's just not fair that Frida, the kid supposed to just be part of the crowd, got her own panel to shine - readers even learned her name! Frida is the one you *expect* to be cut, but she's fun to color and that keeps letting her sneak into strips. Oh well, Mikey still gets his time to shine in this summer's big storyline.

Anyway, I'm trying to get the most of this image. It's now a lame wallpaper on the Precocious site and available for order as a print and magnet and whatever on the DeviantArt page.

Fun for the whole family!

I was raised on newspaper comics, and I strive to make a newspaper-worthy comic. I'm talking figurative newspaper here, as currently most newspapers are in sad decline and no longer worth the trouble. Whatever, it's the TONE I want to capture, and the delivery method can change. Oh, and it has.

I've signed on with two groups, both in the family-friendly comic vein, and I am greatly enjoying this current goody goody mentality.

First, as mentioned in the last post, is Kidjutsu, a site created to being comics to kids. When I was a kid, I spent my library time hunting down old Peanuts collections instead of blindly sticking with Judy Blume. I'll always claim I learned most of my vocabulary from reading Calvin and Hobbes. Comics are vital in getting kids to love reading, and Kidjutsu aims at providing kids a one-stop resource with tons of comic volumes to choose from.

Precocious will eventually join that line-up once I do some redrawing and reformatting. Finally, my tendency to create long story arcs pays off! I have issues - and they're not all mental!

The second site I'm pimping out is Family Webcomics, which does exactly what you think it does. It's very thorough in classifying and listing family-friendly comics, making it an excellent resource for parents. Precocious joined the list and I hope to be an active contributor there as well. It is my hope that when I am up against the wall, judged while a gun is held to my temple, I can point out I was a FAMILY-FRIENDLY guy. That could save my life! I'll admit that my family love might work more for a liberal family, but that's due to intelligence and being, you know, interesting. If a conservative mother is going to faint the second she reads the word "sucks" in her kid's comics, I can't really do anything about that. It's not like I could do or say anything to do more damage to her children than her anyway.

On the Family Webcomics forums, the creator, Mirz, put out a request for homepage splash art. This is something I can do! Here is my contribution to the cause:



Of course I had to feature my strip's giant Et family - with so many kids I can't fit them all in a square composition. I sorta felt bad about leaving Frida and Michelangelo out, so I started work in a second sketch:



This sketch hit a wall when I realized what a pain it would be to make it clear the object the family is viewing in the foreground is a monitor. But I did include all the children! Minor victory!

The Et Family! *click* *click*

What can I say, crazy families are on my mind.

Drawing something like this is a MAJOR challenge, since every character (well, not the twins) are different heights and sizes. I can't claim the shot is any good at all, but anyone remotely close to accurate is wild success at this point.

I still love how varied the Et family is, even if it means more trouble than it's worth when cartooning. Gene is a buff-colored kitty, Sky is a gray tabby, Tiffany is a calico, Michaelangelo is an orange tabby, Frida is a tortoiseshell and the twins are white. This counters an earlier Et family breakdown, but now that all of them have been drawn in the comic, the current roster is more or less official. (I can still alter colorings if I want, but thinking of doing the strip in color makes me cry in fear.)

Oh, yeah. In case you're wondering, eight new strips are done (nine if you count the Black Friday one) and progress continues. 24 strips to go before Precocious BECOMES REAL!

Enter... THE MOTHERS!

I am at the point in the first storyline where the other moms appear. (Well, not Bud's mom.... she'll be here for the holidays, though!)

As any Precocious scholar can see, I have been deliberately trying to make my kids shorter and cuter. This small change is positive for the strip - the kid's arms can't reach the top of their heads, but the shortness allows for more adorable dialog - but it also means rethinking the look of the parents. For Sky, the change is beneficial because I get more face space for her cranial quirks. For Ivy... the bigger head makes he look really young. One think I'm trying to get around this is giving the adult women the almond eyes. It works when I do it right...but I rarely do it right. The other is to make the eyes proportionally smaller on the adults. This means I must counter all the muscle memory I build up - but correcting it is far easier when drawing the strip than with even-erasing-shows-up-when-scanned sketches. Finally, I could just alter the character design to suit the latest style.

Is it time to rethink Ivy's hair draping over her face? Maybe try shorter bangs? Maybe shrink the ears to a more natural size? Maybe stop worrying over a character who is obviously Autumn's mother? (In fact, Autumn looking like Ivy's mini-me is a key point in many stories and somewhat of a go-to gag.) In conclusion, I need to stop worrying and enjoy the cute.

(I may do a Sky-centric update tomorrow. Ivy got the nod today because I could just scan the sketchbook page I filled with her. Today, laziness won.)

Back to the grind...

I'm home! Just in time to finish off another sketchbook. Even with the lack of art production in DC, this thing was completed far too fast. The more I work in a sketchbook, the less I work on things that need to be done. Ahh, such a bright future I see!



Here is the standard collection of sketches that didn't fit on other posts. First is one of the few non-profile Buds that were even half-decent. It's the same ol' consequence: Once I get a decent handle on a character, I move my focus to others. Then, when I go *back* to the character I DRAW THE MOST, suddenly I have to remember where the friggin' ears go!

The Max is a sketch I referenced in the Boys Wanna Fight post. It was too good to fit the crappy sketches, so it was replaced. Such is the story of my life. *sob*

Autumn is why my Bud drawings are sucking now! I lost confidence in drawing her, so she filled up my sketchbook! Bud went into the corner with Chinatown and Ruby Tuesdays. This sketch is my favorite (complete) one that didn't get posted yet. (I think...)



As everyone knows, my action drawing is rather sub-par. This was my attempt to better myself. As everyone can see, it is rather sub-par.



As mentioned in my Et kids post, Frida was too tiny for all her features. (Or I'm just incompetent.) To play around, I decided to do a Frida as Tiffany-sized, or Tiffany in a Frida costume. Whatever.



This was the final non-crap sketch of the sketchbook, so let's go out on that. Woohoo!

Be fruitful and multiply

These designs are hardly set in stone, but I've made my first attempts at drawing ALL the Et children. Going by age (right to left), here are the kids:

Tiffany, age 9 - Yeah, I think we know her. This is an old sketch. I added it just to show relative size.

Michelangelo, age 6 - Mostly he is the "extra" kid pulled in if I need another for a story. He's innocent enough to provide a contrast when needed. For his look, I went with a gray tabby kitty look and an old school TV cowlick hairstyle.

Frida, age 4 - As of now, her sole purpose is to exacerbate situations. If her surroundings are quiet, she is quiet. If kids are going crazy in the room, she adds to the chorus of insanity. For her look, I wanted to do a tortoiseshell cat, but that proved difficult. The final Frida will probably look completely different. This sketch was the second I made, where all the black patches were eliminated. I choked. I might not even keep the dual braids, as they conflict with the tiny figure. *sob*

"This" & "That", age 2 - I'm not sure what exact age they'll have, but terrible twos sounds right. They were going to be tabbies, one orange and one gray, but I decided simplicity was the best bet with my fumbling fingers for now. They exist to make adults regret procreation. Like the rest of their siblings, they are named after artists Gene and Sky admire (don't asked about Tiffany...), but we'll never know which artists as they are always referred to with duo nicknames. (Yes, they are often called Thing 1 and Thing 2.)

Overall, the goal is to use the extra Ets for general background chaos in family scenes. If I want to use them, they're there, but mostly they are just really annoying pieces of furniture.

Missing Persons

These are not the best sketches to show, but I wanted to cover a couple characters mostly ignored here so far.



Yes, it's yet another family portrait formed by combining various sketches that results in a strange scene. Why are the normally cheerful Linkletters concerned? Heck, even Harvey's smile is far too subdued for him! What is wrong? Well, tonight I am a shitty artist!

I thought I had inspiration, but then I watched a Wes Anderson movie. When will I learn that man is creative DEATH? The crappy painting I made while watching The Darjeeling Limited got rejected from the Mill show - even after I reworked it. Now, The Life Aquatic has sapped the joy from my cheeriest of characters. Wes, dude, you're going Tori Amos on us. You've reached the point where no one questions you... so no one tells you to EDIT YOUR SHIT DOWN! Tori's been making double albums...with about half the songs good. That's dumb, yet forgivable, because iTunes allows me to strike her failure from the record. I can't do that with a DVD, Wes. Stylish filler is still FILLER and it seems to drain my soul. AND THIS IS COMING FROM *ME* WES! MOST OF MY POSTS ARE USELESS BLOAT AND EVEN *I'M* TIRED OF YOUR SHIT! This is why Cracked wrote an article about why the movie didn't work!

Wow, that was... uh... unplanned. Oh well. Anyway, there's a poor version of Harvey Linkletter - but he's finally on here! Fun fact: In the post introducing Gene Et, I also had a image of Harvey Linkletter ready to go and fill in the final missing parent. All it took was one misclick in photoshop and I was left with... an image of Gene with Harvey's name on it. Whoops. Of course, I had closed out of Photoshop before I realized my mistake. I didn't go back because, well, that Harvey sketch kinda sucked too. The dude is just hard to draw! I have come to rely on cranial fluffiness to draw my characters...and Harvey is supposed to tallish, thin and *regular* animal fluffy. Deirdre must be noticeably fluffier! The fluffiness change throws my already weak proportion control out of whack. The silly oversized bow tie doesn't help either. Deirdre's sketch is weak too, but considering I just posted an awesome one of her below - even if she's missing feet in said sketch - I'm content that you know I *can* draw her well.



Suzette has only made one appearance so far, for a far different reason. While I'm total weaksauce in drawing Precocious parents, I've got Suzette down. Because of this, I practice drawing her far less - which means fewer chances of a fully-rendered Suzette working. (For me, having a character "down" is still equivalent to, like, a 10% success rate. Dammit.) This isn't the best Suzette either (again, I blame Wes Anderson) but her angry face is always fun - and far more common than the innocent look she sported in her other appearance here.

So, yeah, I seem to be posting whatever I can to make up for lost time after my tooth explosion. I even had another self-indulgent rambling ready for later... but Wes Anderson has ruined those for me. At least for today.

Fathers Day

As promised, here's another Precocious parent. Originally Harvey Linkletter was also going in this post, but his sketch was lost to a tragic Photoshop accident. Oh well, gives me time to make better sketches to share. (It'd been about a year since I last drew Harvey.)

Gene Et, Tiffany's dad, is a blessed soul. His unnatural good luck has allowed him to find success without even trying. Currently, he's a VP in some big corporation and lost in the bureaucracy. He's too highly ranked to take the fall for small mistakes and not ranked high enough to take the fall for big ones. In truth, he has no clue what his job actually is! All he does is show up, play online for eight hours and go home with glowing performance reviews. Sitting a desk with nothing to do may not be your definition of blessed (it's not mine either) but Gene makes the best use of his time. Oh, and pay is excellent! Like any blessed individual, Gene tends to be more fun-loving and irresponsible than most. Still, things always work out in the end for him.

Gene is a character I struggled with in designing. It would be a cop-out to just make him an older, male Tiffany. Yes, it's cartoon logic to have parents look exactly like their children - and, yes, I know it's the other way around, but in these cartoons the kids are designed first - but it bugs me so. When taking on Precocious, I wanted to mix things up. In fact, the idea of family likeness is the center of Precocious' second story arc.

When it comes to kid/parent clones, you have the Pingo family. As they are red foxes, there's only so much wiggle room there. At most I will play with the coloring of each individual Pingo, but their similarities are something I will use in storytelling. Autumn is the spitting image of Ivy as a child, much to Ivy's chagrin.

Harvey and Deirdre Linkletter also have a clear resemblance to their child. To illustrate how well they match up, each parent has one floppy ear. Their son, Jacob, has both. Physically, Jacob and Harvey are both cream-colored mutts. The difference, non-floppy ear aside, is that Jacob is far fluffier. Said fluffiness comes from Deirdre, who is modeled after a border collie. The family ties are visually obvious, but the characters still have their unique looks. I'm happy with this balance.

Both of my kitty families were modeled after actual kitty genetics. We all know that house cat litters can contain several coloration varieties. In the Oven family, Bud does have a clear resemblance to his mother, Sydney. (The Scottish fold ears go a long way.) Joseph Oven, however, is a giant, hulking white feline. Father and son look like they have nothing in common - but that's kitty cats for you, right?

For the Et family, I went for the general mix. Gene is a buff-colored cat. Sky is a simplified gray tabby. (I refuse to draw all those stripes!) Tiffany is a simplified calico, who might get more noticeable patches of color on her paws/tail as time goes on. The rest of the Et children will be traditional cat variances. While they haven't been designed yet, I'm thinking one will be a tortoiseshell and the rest will be a mix of gray and orange tabbies.

Have I put too much thought into this stuff? I'm sure. Still, I hope that by planning things out like this I can create a rich strip with more sophistication and depth. Only time will tell if this strange ambition pays off.