This post will pillage your house and rape your women

When I decided to work on painting, I asked my grandfather what I should paint. He suggested painting a viking ship. Not only has this always been his default answer, but a magazine was on the table and open to an article about viking ships. Surprise!

I did my part and made him some sketches from the pictures in the article, but they're more inclined to wind up on the fridge than on canvas. See, it's kinda hard to take a two-inch sketch and blow it up to three feet by three feet and retain the technical aspects.

So, MORE FLOWERS! The first flower painting is "done" in that I won't work on it anymore, so a second has begun. I will be working on it later tonight and will try to get photos via webcam of both to share tomorrow.

Your wall hungers for my product

I am painting flowers! I AM PAINTING GODDAMN FLOWERS! It's... well, actually, it's kind of refreshing. I made a vow to do one painting during my visit stay, as I have access to my aunt's supplies, and today I woke up with the "OMG I HAVE TO PAINT" feeling. It's rare, so one must run with it.

After waking, I sat up to see a bowl of plastic poinsettias sitting at the foot of my bed. Good enough! So far it's been a nice change of pace. The canvasses here are giant, so I'm going for the family-friendly flower painting on the wall sell-out approach. Clearly, my personality forces its way through no matter what subject I choose. The limited selection of colors meant I gave up trying to get the color I wanted and just used whatever was next. All the green is too bright or too light. There is no black, so I have to use purple. Whatever, man, a limited palette is actually rather freeing.

I have no idea how this will turn out. Will I sharpen the lines and add dept or go for my normal flat and colorful complexity? Who knows. It's time to get back to work and see!

This has been a makeshift day all around. I'm painting with what I have and taking photos by rearranging lamps and tossing my laptop around.

This is my angry face

I was thinking about cracking open a bottle of wine all evening. I didn't, but clearly I must be mentally drunk. MIND OVER MATTER, PEOPLE!

I should have taken my sleeping pill an hour ago. If I was a livejournal douchebag, I would predict my mood would be set to "sluggish" tomorrow morning. Look, folks, I've already fucked around on Facebook, my webcam and a blog tonight - any further douchebaggery would be lethal. Oh well, the world will have to do without my self-absorbed postings about which commercial jingles anger me.

Blue is gray. War is peace. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

I didn't feel like working on the strip today (maybe later) and I had this new pad of Bristol board with a small selection of colored pencils. I've been wanting to see how Sky looked with her conceived gray tabby coloring. I didn't bring any gray pencils with me; nor could I find a pencil sharpener, which further limited the options. Fuck it, light blue is good enough!

Gene was added for balance and practice. Now that I look at him, I think his hair color needs to be changed. The joke is just a bit *too* obvious at this point. I guess I can play with various hair colors... or just continue to work in ink and ignore color completely.

My god, what have I done!?

The thing about designing unique characters with their own set of physical quirks is that, when one is not paying attention, doodles end up being some unfortunate hybrid that don't match anyone!

It's all about the fluffiness! My cartoon characters all have some sort of fluffiness represented in their cheeks. Some fluff points are rounded, some are sharp. If I'm not sketching with any purpose, I let the pencil decide what I'll do. I'll draw the basics of a face and then decide which character is being drawn. Buuuut, the problem with lazy drawing is muscle memory seems to even things out and make me draw a face that is between the pointy and rounded. It doesn't match up well with anyone, so I either have to force it to be someone, use the eraser to correct the sketch to death or draw a random character.

This sketch went wrong early. It clearly wasn't a Bud, and the face was too masculine to be turned into Tiffany... so I decided to draw the "missing link" character between the two families. Shortly after I started I realized the missing link is not supposed to look like the kids, but like their FATHERS. D'oh. So, hey, fuck it, LET'S MAKE A CREEPY HYBRID OF MY MAIN CHARACTERS! It's highly disturbing.

To blather on, let me explain the subtleties of cheek fluff:

The general rule is kitty cheeks are rounded and doggy cheeks are pointy. It's the degree of the point that subtly differentiates between the characters.

Bud: His cheeks are the most obvious, as they are very round. The fluff *should* point down.

Autumn: Her cheeks are pointy and wider. They can droop a bit depending on her mood, but the normally pointy personality means normally pointy cheeks. Over time, I've scaled her cheeks back for cuteness, but we'll see how that plays.

Jacob: In theory his cheeks are the same as Autumn's, but his varies far more often. This is partly because it's somewhat easy to force my accidental hybrids into Jacobs, and partly because Jacob's impressionable nature softens his facial features.

Tiffany: This is probably impossible for anyone but be to notice, but Tiffany's cheeks and jaws are drawn with a different motion than the rest. In theory, she is supposed to have an angular jaw with smaller-than-average round points. In practice, they look like every other kitty's cheeks. Both lack of technique and affinity for cuteness bring her more into the norm. This does explain why I keep screwing up Tiff's jawline, at least.

Suzette: Of all the doggies, her cheeks are the most rounded. The motions for the basics of Suzette's face closely resemble Bud's. Suzette is also a good default for when I screw up a face, since the bangs and ears override everything.

Dionne: Her face should be halfway between Bud and Suzette. Since I need more cheek space for spots, the roundness helps.

Max: His cheeks should have Autumn's width and Jacob's slight rounding. I should note here that all my best Max drawings are accidental and that it's very hard for me to draw him on cue.

Roddy: Initially, the hybrid cheeks were meant for Roddy, but I'm starting to sour on it. If I'm not careful, Roddy's face looks fat because when a black outline is filled with black it stops being an outline and just becomes thickness. I'm trying to get around this by drawing him with the Tiffany technique. I really won't know what works best until I've put him down in ink a few more times.

If you're still reading at this point, I'm impressed. I find it fascinating that so much thought was put into what are nearly imperceptible variations in features - but this might only because I find *myself* so fascinating.

I cannot draw a newspaper from memory

Soren Pingo: Newspaper reader. I dunno... are wry comments always funnier when said by a newspaper reader? Now that I think of it, a future storyline is partly based around Soren's daily newspaper rituals. Librarians love reading... but is reading a newspaper when surrounded by books cheating? Maybe it's like flirting with the floozy checkout girl just because she smiled at you and then going home to your beloved wife. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about sexualized word delivery units.

So where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to see if I could do another family portrait with the Pingos because I haven't drawn many Sorens. This quickly failed as I somehow couldn't draw a proper Autumn without soiling the page with my drool. Ok, that sounds really wrong, especially after a paragraph where I implied newspapers have loose morals and inclination to naughty deviation. What I'm saying here is that I finally drew a worthwhile Autumn and then did one of those "about damn time" sounds - which resulted in my spitting all over the page. Maybe this is why my friends never invite me to parties.

Portrait failed, I tried to draw a Soren just for practice. As the title of this post states, I couldn't figure out the proper newspaper pose, so I gave him the blank cheer expression that he would have had in the posed family portrait. Somehow, with this guy, it's appropriate no matter the context.

Soren is also supposed to be a bit overweight, but I'm not sure how well that came across. It's surprisingly difficult to get these weight subtleties with the characters at this point. Soren is chunky. Deirdre is curvy. Sky is skinny and compact. Ivy is to be the moderately-slender control case. None of that really comes across with the strip yet. I'm not even getting into Harvey Linkletter, since I'm still not sure what proportions are going on with that guy.

Soren was named after the Dane that came to America and started my Paulsen family, by the way. Just FYI. (Edit long after the fact: Turns out he was Soren Hansen, but his daughter still bred Paulsens!)

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!

In most comics, no one ages

Ok, so I've been working on the comic these past few days, which means precious few sketches to share and I have to scramble for content. Since I do want to average a post a day, as this is the only forum I feel I have right now, I need to figure out something. The other stuff I've been dealing with is not what I'd prefer to blog about. First, this is primarily an art blog for me to show off and work through my ideas. Second, I try my best not to be *that blogger* with the self-absorbed bullshit. Third, I don't like sharing things unless it's me-centric. Not only is it ego, but I'm not comfortable with discussing loved ones in too much detail. So many fools forget what a public place the internet is.

What you see here is something I fished out of the trash. Today everyone else was out and I was alone to take care of my grandfather, who was up and about more than usual. Since I had my pencil with me, I did a small sketch on a scrap of paper found in the desk drawer to talk about cartooning. It was something quick and lame, so I folded the paper up and tossed it. That's when I saw what the scrap of paper was. You can write the rest of this post yourself, so I'm going to take my leave before fully becoming that blogger.

Best panel I ever drew...

Now that I am "settled" in DC for a week or so, I finally have time to do some work. Lots of inking tonight, with two new strips finished so far. One, as you can infer, was the a breeze to complete.

If only I could be minimalist all the time...

Trapped in Limbo

With the change of schedule, my convenient return home for a dentist appointment became not so much convenient. With the crappy weather and a worried mother, I am not in Winchester for tonight only. With my aunt scheduling several appointments in Delaware *next* because she wasn't aware my schedule had changed to allow her to go up there *this* week, I'll likely be in DC until... hell if I know.

Just to add to the cheer, I got home to find my mother's laptop all wonky and in need of fixing. After punching in a few times, it rebooted a few times and that seemed to do it. Yay! Then I moved to my computer to burn some CDs for my aunt, thinking I was heading home tonight. My computer decided to crash instead. Instead of restarting, Microsoft thought that would be the perfect time for an update! (Or, more likely, this is why computer crashed in the first place.) It has been flashing, "Installing update 1 of 1, do not reset or pull the plug!" for about four hours now. I'm sure rebooting mid-update can only have good outcomes. Hey, at least I got the other computer working!

So now I am in Winchester, while my working computer and art supplies are in DC. What the heck do I do to justify a blog post?

I FUCK WITH A WEBCAM OF COURSE!

First I capped the sketches I did here, but I can't do any Photoshopping as that program is being held hostage by Microsoft. With the ART out of the way, the only thing I could do was make funny face. It just had to be done.


Ok, I may be pale as a ghost - yet my scary factor leaves much to be desired.

JAZZHANDS!


Check out the BREEZY look! There should be a beach scene behind me.

Uh... I just wanted to see what capping did if I wiggled my fingers.



Just what am I doing to this cat?

Hey, it was either stupid pictures of me or ANOTHER LONG ESSAY! What would you have preferred?