The first portrait

First come, first serve!

I was given three photos of our friend here. Two clean-shaven. One beard. C'mon, you know I can't resist!

This is approximately 4.5x6" and done on a Canson drawing pad. I want to keep playing around with these to see where the comfort zone is and what tricks I can pull. If anyone wants to be a part of this experiment, send me a photo!

I am not Commander Riker

Growing the beard does nothing to improve my life, appearance or the general quality of all things surrounding me - yet I keep growing one anyway!

Why? First, because I am profoundly lazy. As I am decidedly non-wolfman, my beard doesn't grow with any aggressive speed. There's not much beard change from day to day, so it's very easy to shrug my shoulders and say, "Meh, I'll tackle it tomorrow." As time went on, the beard procrastination time grew longer and longer - until I actually had a REAL. FRIGGIN. BEARD. That was unexpected.

Compounding my laziness is my bathroom's plumbing. For some reason, the water in the sink takes a long time to heat up. So every morning, when I would plan to shave, I would stumble over to the sink, turn it on, wait a minute, give up and return to bed for a few more precious minutes of sleep. I decided to go with the crazy beard thing in Savannah. It makes me look like a proper art student! I even grew to like having a moderate amount of facial hair.

But the thing about hair is that it grows, and nice beards look nice for a limited time. Sure, I could buy a beard trimmer and just use that - but implies I am committed to having a beard. Even though I've rocked facial hair for most of the past year, I still don't consider myself a bearded dude. All cartoon Chrispys drawn by me are clean-shaven! No, my beard will only exist as a sign of laziness and insanity! I'll let it grow until it become truly hideous, shave it off and start the cycle anew.

A few weeks ago, the time to shave came. Like a true lazy person, I shrugged it off and said I'd do it the next day. There was only one problem: THE HOCKEY PLAYOFFS STARTED THAT DAY!

It's a tradition in hockey to grow a playoff beard while your team is in the playoffs, and I was going to partake in that tradition this year. If I shaved after the playoffs started, that would jinx my team. But... but I REALLY needed to shave!

Well, seeing as my team is the Washington Capitals, who are known for choking in the playoffs year after year, I figured that problem would take care of itself. And if they succeeded, DUDE, MY TEAM IS WINNING! A crazy "I'm homeless and unstable" beard is TOTALLY worth that! Sure enough, the Caps knocked out their first round opponent with relative ease. Go beard!

And then round two began. Loss. Loss. Loss. The Caps are still alive, but things are as bleak as they could be. You know what, guys? You don't need my beard's help any more. Shortly after the game ended today in heartbreaking fashion, I walked to the bathroom and grabbed my razor. I am done with you, playoff beard!

Despite my massive jinxing of my team, I will continue to root for the Caps to pull the miracle. They don't need my beard to succeed - THE MAGIC WAS IN THEM THE WHOLE TIME!

(Yeah, they're gonna get swept and it's all my fault.)

Making good on my threats.

I have been a vocal support of Alone in a Crowd's Hopetail agenda for a while. (Such as with this strip.) So last night, after wrecking a few trains in my interview, I hung around the chatroom with AIaC's Tom (and Joshua of Got the Point?) and grabbed for a bit. Somewhere along the line I made a joke about putting my hair up in Hopetails while looking as gross and ugly as possible. (Rum was involved.) Well, since I've been here struggling to come up with a blog topic for today, and since Tom happened to retweet his Hopetails strip at such a moment, I decided to go through it - dignity be damned!



You know what? It's a surprisingly difficult look to pull off. At least for a dude who is unpracticed in the ways of hair artistry. My Hopetails kept sliding down my head, so THIS IS THE BEST YOU GET, TOM! My hair is now full of tangles too. Conclusion: Hopetails are dangerous in the wrong hands.

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.)

Who is this handsome devil?

Would you believe it's me? The "handsome" part probably threw you off. I forgive you. Sarcasm on the internet requires italics.

Granted, it also doesn't look that much like me yet. It's step one, so you take what you can get. Click on the "painting" label for this post to see how other paintings evolved from odd sketches. I might look like me yet! Stranger things have happened!

Then again, this canvass is cursed. So far it's been the place of an aborted Marilee painting and a failed Millie painting. (My eyes are, appropriately, resting on Millie's breasts.) Maybe third time's a charm? Eh, at this point I'll take what I can get. Besides, the only person I offend with failure this time is myself.

This is going to be a challenge. Not only will failure offend me, but I'm trying to paint a dude in a series that features only chicks. (Yeah, I'm putting myself on the "On Beauty" category. Fuck you for rolling your eyes!) There's a reason I only paint chicks. Not only are their infinitely hotter than dudes, but their delicate features are far easier to handle in my style. Think about the sexy standards for men: Words like "rugged" and "stubble" pop up. How the fuck can I do that in my deliberately flat and simplified style? Fortunately, my long, luxurious hippie hair gives me something fun with which to work. I CAN BE BISHONEN! I'm not sure it's a good thing, but it fits the series, I guess.

More nightmare fuel: The sketch layered over the original photo, to show I'm not *that* far off in the details department. ENJOY YOUR SLEEP TONIGHT!



Edit: This picture makes me look like a total butterface. That is so not cool!

Who are these people?

Out-of-town-posting-from-the-past, costume change post #2!

It's like in anime, where characters all have the same basic physical molds and hair + accessories is the entirety of their identifying factors! These two look like completely different characters! That, or I really sucked at drawing Autumn and Tiffany with swapped styles. The braid I like, but the rest is simply against God's will. I had better sketches of both in prior books (although that may be whitewashed memory) - but none were the full look/pose deal.

Oh well, I have until the end of the month to get it right.

*panic*



Ok, I couldn't deal with it... so here's version 2!

Such commitment I have to my public

Hey, Dana! Whaddup?

So there's an option on this thing to set a post date and time. Since I'll be out of town without the internet, how can I meet my goal of one worthless post per day(-ish)? Let's see if this feature is purely cosmetic or not!

The sketches I'm sharing are for an idea for a Halloween strip, in which the kids swap their trademark looks. The best Halloween costumes are so in-jokey that those not in the know think you are either a fool or are not costumed at all!

Up first is the boys trading off. Who would think the swapping of hair styles would cause such massive cognitive dissonance. Bud's hair spiked and Jacob's part is just... unnatural!



Not pictured: The paintbrush my blank canvas characters used to paint my spotted/blotched/freckled characters' conspicuous traits.

Time to hit the "publish post" button and see when this thing appears. It it pops up tonight... eh, fuck it.

"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.