30-minute meals

Y'know, if art is food for the soul...

This is part two of my "I have toys!" experiment. I had 30 minutes, watercolor pencils and PJ Harvey as background music. Inspiration!

So there's my stylized Polly Jean portrait. It was quite fun to do, even if the hurrying precluded perfection. Oh, and if you're wondering, the dark spots on the image are places where water made my paper warp dramatically. Hey, watercolor paper is precious! Bristol board I have in excess.

We hope you will enjoy the show!

Stupid ambition, now I have to draw my characters as Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band! That is ADVANCED cartooning! Oh well, practice makes perfect...

The Magical Mystery Tour

Oh yes, I am veeeerrrry tempted to finish Precocious: The Musical week with a Sunday tribute to the Beatles. How indulgent can one get? LET'S FIND OUT!

It's been a lot of fun drawing my musical strips, citing favorites such as R.E.M., The B-52's (twice!), Talking Heads, Radiohead and Peter Gabriel. Provided you the know the music (I only chose the hits, don't worry), the strips are pretty darn funny too. Only Saturday's is truly a "you have to know this" strip. The rest... you have NO EXCUSE FOR NOT KNOWING THAT! The fault is yours! KNOW BETTER MUSIC!

Big Suit + Small Cartoon Child = Problem

This week's vote incentives for Precocious are indulgent music references. NEXT week's strips OF Precocious, are EVEN MORE INDULGENT music references. Obviously, at some point I was going to draw one of my kids in David Byrne's oversize suit from Stop Making Sense.

Turns out cartoon proportions are a sartorial nightmare. Let's ignore the whole "how can they fit those giant heads through those tiny collars" thing and focus on arms and legs. Tiny, short legs. As Calvin once said to Hobbes, "SHORT PANTS TOUCH MY FEET, OK?!" Granted, my kids aren't quite like that, but when an oversize jacket gets in the way... Calvintown.

Will I keep the visual gag, which fortunately was not vital to the strip, or will I chicken out and draw Jacob in his already-difficult Waldo shirt?

I like the color because it matches my laptop...am I shallow?

As I am just about the most unpopular person on the planet, I have to make decisions on what to do with the time someone normal would spend socializing. Do I fill the void by playing video games? Watching TV/DVDs? Taking up a substance abuse problem? All of these are good options. Unfortunately, I am less than pleased with the new Mario Kart (do I have the patience to keep going until I stop sucking...I dunno) and my worthless waste of resources brother has lost all his netflix DVDs, so movies are out as well. Ritalin means I'll die of a bad reaction before I get the hobby-ish devotion that eventual comes from drug addiction, so I can't even destroy myself in rock star fashion. Dammit! What the heck can I do with my void of a life if destruction is (for now) off the table?

The only options I had left were blogging about emotions and likening my life to various songs...or being productive. So, hey, check out the first mock-up for the Precocious web site!

Yes, that would be one of the strips sitting on the page. I didn't want to share a full strip this early, but what the hey. I think I can trust all zero people that read this blog to respect my intellectual property. So, nonexistent readers, you can send me some feedback on the design - in case you suddenly become real. (By the way, if I have such conjuring powers and I've spent it on a blog readers instead of bringing the woman of my dreams into my life, I will be quite upset.)