I can count to 400!

Today was a great day for productivity. As I type, the ink is drying on Precocious strip #400. In a stroke of good luck, my 400th strip will land on a Sunday, giving me extra space to play around! In a stroke of entirely contrived luck, the latest Precocious storyline will finish up on Saturday, freeing me up to do whatever I want! This won't be like 300, when that storyline ended at... 301. Missed it by *that* much! This 400 will get the celebration it deserves!

Ok, so it won't be a crazy spectacular thing, but at least I get to have some fun. And now it is time for me to get back to work. 400 may be inked, but 399, 398, etc. still need a taste of my pen! Maybe tomorrow I will do some painting and make the world a brighter, happier place.

Cosplaying

Oh, Quincy, you are fun to use because you have no shame about enjoying your passions. Meanwhile, I whip myself and wear a hairshirt every time I play Pokemon. (My favorite part: The breeding! *hangs head*)

Here are some sketches I did for the next Copper Road strip. How much dorky dress-up can I fit in? I came up short in anime cosplaying. I don't know what's popular and well-known in anime circles anymore. Heck, I don't know what's going on anywhere with these kids these days. I'm old and useless! *sob*

Destroying more Childhood Memories

Who else could turn paddleboats into a life or death battle? Also, this is the first proof that Sapphire Lake DOES actually involve a lake.

I'm finishing up the sketching of the remaining May strips, and one involves a rather complex composition involving a paddleboat battle with Diamond Bluffs in the background. Considering I can't even handle the perspective of a COUCH, this may have been a bad idea. Oh, the things I do for my art!

That teenage feeling

You know those sketches withheld two days ago? The ones I thought had the potential to destroy ones faith in a just and loving universe? Well, I redrew them... and I'm still rather uncomfortable with the concept. BUT, this is one of those cliches. If you have a comic with kids, you have to draw them all grown up. So, I present to you... PROM-AGED GENIUSES!

This is all TOTALLY non-canon, of course...



So here we have our heroes... fairly unravaged by age. It's not like I could augment Autumn much, since the joke is that she'll grow up to look EXACTLY like her mother. Autumn's distinguishing characteristic in her family is her strong "bends like copper wire" hair. At 18, she likely wants to restrain that a bit - resulting in a bulky Tiffany-esque braid.

Bud's sketch here isn't as good as the first one I did. But that one wasn't as large, so I had to go with this. The premise here is that, although he's identified as the independent character formed by an absence of parental supervision, he cannot escape genetics. He's hit a growth spurt, making him the tallest of the six pictured here, and he might just end up closer to his daddy's size than anyone could expect. (At this point, my 5'11" self would like to give those doctors, who said I'd never top 5'7" because I was too tiny as a kid, a hearty IN YOUR FACE!) The earlier aged Bud sketch gave him a more teen-friendly hairstyle and it had more of the "maturing male cat" feel to it. (In a non-creepy fashion.) It was already obvious Bud's hair and ears come from his mommy, but the secret specter that haunts him now is her love of video games! Bud fought against it all his life, but that's her old DS he's playing! Mwa ha ha!



Now things get slightly odd. Roddy's no surprise, since he appears to have just grown in size and not matured in personal style at all. How, uh, creative of me. No, his distinguishing look here is his football uniform and clipboard in hand. Anyone who knows the game knows what that means: Backup quarterback! On a likely-weak high school team! Oh, destiny!

Jacob. Oh my. The poor child has finally snapped and gone... emo? There was a time when "I live in a spiritual vacuum" was a punchline and not a tedious and oft-repeated conversation filler/killer. His outfit is meant to look like a hybrid between militant religious garb... and a fast food restaurant uniform. Is there no better symbol for high school "philosophers"?



And here I am both amused and disturbed. I enjoy the neckline reversal on display here. Dionne now wears the bell collar and Suzette sports the heart on her... uh... suddenly ample chest. (You are allowed to shudder here.) Yes, the joke here is that Suzette grew up to be tall, shapely and sexy... SO FUCK FEMINISM! Everyone pays attention to her now! The joke is funny enough to me that I went ahead and drew cleavage on a character normally drawn as a 9-year-old. Oh yeah, she's only 17 here; so if you like the sketch for any reason other than humor, that's one more personal problem you can add to the list.

On the other side, Dionne hasn't taken up the militant mantle. I think she wears the bell just to point out the Suzettian Hypocrisy. Otherwise, I gotta admit the 18-year-old Dionne turned out to be extremely adorable. This is the sketch that made me toss aside a loss of youthful magic and go ahead with the sharing.

So where are Tiffany and Max? For Max, I ran out of sketchbook space. (Unfortunately, drawing older Suzette took multiple tries.) Also, Max isn't a character likely to change over time. He'd still be bigger than the rest, just with more adult proportions. Ooh! For Tiffany, I know her future fate in this decidedly non-canon world... and I'm not telling! It's something so funny that I won't let myself treat this post as a purge... instead there's a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE this could just be a staging area. (If my strip has a long run, I've debated having "non-canon weeks" when I could toss out all my normal discretion and brutally drop the fourth wall on top of my unsuspecting cast.)

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.

The way we wuz

I am out of my normal sketchbooks. The only thing left is the tiny sketchbook I keep in my car. It's the "in case of emergency" one that I can grab when attending things such as art openings. The first use came almost a year ago, at the Art at the Mill opening.

Without any other sketchbooks, the emergency is now! I opened it, took a look and HOLY CRAP MY OLD SKETCHES WERE TOTAL WEAKSAUCE! The ones pictured are the BEST. It's embarrassing.

It's weird to think that it wasn't even a year ago when some of my character designs weren't set. I have a long way to go still. This is depressing.

Meet Ze Monsta

An alternate title could be "Hot for Teacher" - but why reference Van Halen over the lovely PJ Harvey?

This comely lass is Bette Monster, the educator for my little hellions.

Like the rest of my crew, she is a victim of my love for silly names. Her first name is a reference to the Precocious class' 13 kids first and last names all starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The surname Monster plays in wonderfully with the role of an authority figure. When you're literally under the command of a Monster, what are you to do? There's also the connotation that monsters are hideous beings, while Bette is clearly hot. (Cartoon collies might not be your thing, so trust me that she's the animal equivalent of a babe.)

The role of a comic teacher is key to adding a new dynamic to a strip. In Calvin and Hobbes and Ozy & Millie, the teacher is an exasperated educator at the mercy of the precocious characters - with only the power of grading and threat of detention to protect them. In Peanuts and Fox Trot, different instructors had different personalities. Fox Trot's professors were mostly of the sarcastic variety (with their own subtleties), but Bill Amend did make a choice once to shake things up. Precocious Jason Fox loved exasperating his teacher with his irritating genius, but when she retired his life was thrown into chaos. The new teacher, Miss O'Malley (I think) was young and on the ball. Jason at one point cried out in horror, "She's challenging me!" Miss O'Malley could get thrown off by Jason's excesses, of course, but I really liked the idea of someone in authority who could put him in his place. With Peanuts, while educators eventually warped into trombones vexed by Peppermint Patty, it should be noted that earlier instructors (around the 60's strips - which is as far as the published archives currently go) were very human. Charlie Brown, Linus and company watched them fall in love, get heartbroken, get married, crack up, learn life lessons, leave and return. I enjoy the idea of such rich characters existing purely off-panel. (See: every verbose post about my minor characters who won't appear for years or ever.) My own Monster is very much inspired by Miss O'Malley and those of the early Peanuts universe.

Bette has long since learned that the best she can do is let the kids choose their own directions and try to nudge them towards the right path. While she does remarkably well in keeping her class in a productive, controlled-chaos state, it's only natural that she can be exasperated at times. At least she's been teaching this group long enough to know how they tick; she knows when to step in and disarm them and when to step aside at let the inevitable explosions happen.

She's also single, fellas! At 29, Bette has the fear of old in her. With her private life, she alternates between convincing herself she's still a young soul and freaking out about becoming a full adult (getting married, owning a house, having kids) before it's too late. While I am not a furry pin-up girl, I *am* 28-going-on-ancient and hopelessly behind in such growing up things. Bette is my outlet for my own frustrations with aging.

Now, this usually doesn't come out in a classroom setting. When a teacher lets students humanize them or look at them as friends, the balance of authority becomes skewed in a way Ms. Monster can't afford, considering this batch of crazies! The way the human side of Bette emerges comes from her friendship with another couple that's going into maturity kicking and screaming: Gene and Sky Et. Despite them having a huge family, they are only 33 and 29, respectively. The Bette-Et combo allows each side to see each side of responsibility, and also provides the enabling element to run away from responsibility on occasion. (Alcohol *is* a factor.) If they aren't careful, Tiffany is going to have a *lot* of blackmail material...

Oh, Gene and Sky, you two are going to ensure my strip will never go into mainstream publication with your naughty antics, aren't you?

"Hello In There" Part II: Crying not mandatory

(This is a follow up to the below post, so unless you like to Pulp Fictionalize everything, I suggest reading that post before this one.)

Would you believe that last post was an intro? I *barely* broached the point I was going to make. RAMBLING VERBOSITY IS WHY I AM SO POPULAR!

The real story here is that I'm taking action to de-rut myself and try that strange thing that people do... moving forward. I'm going to stop actively sucking! To contradict myself immediately, I will continue with this post.

Big changes have come to my schedule. I finally got permission to cut my work hours back dramatically. Sad to say, it had been suffocating me. It's not that the work was hard or overly challenge...it was just there. Always. And it was early. I worked there over two years and my body never adjusted to a 9am starting time. Every day was a miserable scramble arrive somewhat close to 9am, followed by half-awake drudgery. Around 11, my body would *actually* wake up, and I'd suddenly want to conquer the planet and do something productive. That means exercise or drawing, not translating a formatted Word document into a clumsy web page. Unattended inspiration has a way of turning on its master. When stimulation fails to come, inspiration turn into fatigue. At the end of the day, regardless of how much I actually did, I was exhausted. My energy didn't start returning until midnight, when I had to sleep. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM HERE?

Is that last paragraph dickishly whiny? Oh, you betcha! Hey, I knew long ago what I needed to be happy and I took efforts to set my life up so I could succeed. I know I have too much stubbornness to change and fit a normal mode. I *am* too selfish, and I'm running with it!

When I took my job, it was part of the long-term plan. I needed to raise money to support myself in grad school, I wanted to learn web design skills *and* the place was wonderfully flexible with hours! Work was great to me and I hope I did enough to make my presence worthwhile. Problem is, when I went full-time, it took up way more than an extra 20 hours a week. It became my life. I became what my 15-year-old self vowed never to become!

So now I have "free time" - a term that is a filthy liar! This is the time for me to do all the soul- and future-enriching tasks that I need to survive. I'm working less but busier than ever. Oh, and since I'm now working according to my natural sleep schedule, I'm now awesome for all my waking hours. (I remain a pathetic create when asleep.) Yeehaw!

So what was the point of all this rambling? I was bored and work (and later at home) and the blog had been neglected. ENJOY MY SOUL!

* * *

Oh, and I did locate the glorious copper hair. It is a flower among weeds, you see. If you spray a weed with herbicide, it's the flower five feet away that dies. Flowers are precious and delicate. Weed, having not been subject to eugenics, retain the hearty strength that flowers sacrificed for likability. On my face, about half a centimeter from the offending white-ish hair, is a beautiful copper hair half the size of those around it. Quality take time to grow, while garbage is available immediately. (That seriously needs to be my motto as an artist, no?)

I command you to listen to "Hello In There" and start crying

I used to have the most beautiful red hair. The color was perfection - a glowing copper one projects onto the fetishized, fantasy Irish woman of one's dreams. It was a natural red hair without the consequences of the "redhead face" that non-fetishied, actual Irish women have. This quality of this hair was a Hollywood interpretation of what red hair should be.

Now I know you're puzzled, seeing as there's a picture of me over on the right. While I am Hollywood sexy - they still film low-budget porn in Hollywood, right? - my hair is clearly non-copperish. Perhaps I am referring to my childhood hair, from a time before the ravages of age stripped me of my cuteness. This is also not the case. A mere child could not appreciate this hair. This hair, friends, was on my chin.

Normally I despise facial hair. It is my curse in life to have a dinkly beard that turns hideous when allowed to grow out and is incapable of ever achieving an acceptable level of bushiness. Should I forgo shaving for too many days, my face rapidly degrades into one that those who are kind would describe as of a degenerate slacker and basement-dwelling loser. Those who are unkind would instead think of a back woods molester or a 16-year-old that tries too hard. I hate facial hair and it hates me. For normal people, this is a conquerable demon. I, however, am severely wrong in the head. I hate shaving almost as much as I hate my beard - if one could call the mange-ravaged dog look of my chin a beard.

Shaving is a morning thing. It requires time and planning to do. For normal people, that's fine. Get up a few minutes early and use the razor blade on the face instead of the normal cutter actions. One of my corrosive abnormalities, unfortunately, has my circadian rhythm firmly set in a non-Eastern time zone mode. In my 9-5 job, 99% of the time I am at least 5 minutes late. Doing something extra like shaving is just not an option. Shaving is a weekend-only task, and even then I can be so lazy that I miss my window of opportunity. When my beard is allowed over a week to grow unchallenged, disaster strikes.

But at least I had that red hair. Among the brown, straggly horrors was this shimmering symbol of awesome. That my malformed and grotesque jaw could produce something so perfect gave me hope. I did have potential! I was capable of creating something wonderful! If my chin could do it, maybe my fingers and brain can join that club. THIS HAIR WAS INSPIRATION!

As it is Friday, it's been almost a week since my last shave and the hair has begun to assert itself. I've gone past "clean shaven" and "somewhat sexy" (even I, with my pathetic hair production, can achieve the seductive stubble - if only for a short time) and into the beginnings of the "lazy grooming practices" phase. As I viewed myself in a mirror earlier with dismay that shaving must soon commence, I sought comfort in the red hair which was my only source of facial pride.

I couldn't find it.

Instead, in the place normally red, was a stand that also boldly stood out on my face. This strand was bright white. Oh. Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

THIS ISN'T HAPPENING! Please tell me that hair - THE ONE HAIR ON MY FACE THAT I LOVED - has not succumbed! I just missed the copper hair, right? I was so shocked by the white hair I overlooked it, right? Right? RIGHT!?

And so I examined my beard further. As always, it was a multicultural garden of colors and shapes. The beard always had its representatives from the hair rainbow milling among the flat brown majority. The random blonde strands reminded me of my Scandinavian roots. The less-interesting reds still reminded me of my inner sexiness. They spiced up a joyless jaw while never being too conspicuous - with exception of that one, glorious hair. But something was off this time. There were far more blonde stands that I remembered. Some of the blondies were awfully light as well. They *were* blonde, right? Hmm.

Only time will tell if this panic is justified. I've spent a lot of time in the sun recently and many of those hairs *do* look more blonde than gray. But still, this is a grim reminder that I am time's bitch. In a week when my life has begun a dramatic - and hopefully positive - shift, my face has become symbolic. I'm growing up by the hair of my chinny chin chin.

"Where do you see yourself in 10 years?"

1998 self: "Married and successful, living in a metropolitan area!"

2008 self: "Gee, I seem to be standing in the same place as my 1998 self. Uh oh."

Don't get so depressed, 2008 self, you're not in the *exact* same place. Shepherd moved on and grew, so you're standing in a new and improved art building! Huzzah!

Today is my last class at Shepherd. EVER. (I know I've said it before, but this time for reals!) This was a school I chose because my high school art teacher went there, someone I barely knew was going there and I just didn't care enough to put any effort into finding a school at the time. I went in thinking I'd knock out some general education requirements on the cheap and transfer to a *real* school after two years.

I tried that. It, uh, ruined my life and set me back at least four years. Whoopsie.

Eventually I pulled myself out of the void, slid into the studio art program, got my degree and even took some graduate classes. I went from a loser student to someone the professors respect. Turns out that tiny college packed a strong contemporary art program. I'm confident in my art as well as my ability to present my art, and I have some wonderful feisty professors to thank for it!

At least I've made the best of living in a rut. I've learned all Shepherd could teach me (transcript-wise) and the program I need for my MFA isn't offered there.

So now that I've knocked out nine credits of graduate studio courses on the cheap, it's time to transfer to a *real* grad school!

Let's hope this plan goes better than the last like it.