I don’t know if I’m catching up, but at least I’m posting daily. For this prompt, “binoculars”, I chose to work on one of my weaknesses: consistency across the same character in different drawings. It’s an essential piece of being a comic artist or cartoonist when using “Sequential Art”, as Will Eisner named it. So I used the prompt to practice it. The wink is my blatant acknowledgement that I’m weak at it.
I really didn’t feel up to drawing today, but I pushed myself. I’m four drawing behind now, and I took too long to do this. I should have sketched out something quicker. This was my second drawing using the iPad to ink. It still feels like cheating to me.
I also chose the wrong ink style for the drawing I was trying to do. Maybe because I was lazy, and looking to do something quick? I did slick, 90’s comic book style hatching when I should have done something more textured and nuanced to capture the creature I was trying to illustrate. I’m playing around with designs for a fungus-type creature for one of my stories: not exactly something you define with slick lines. Whatever. It’s done, and that’s all that I care about.
Oh, and the prompt was “exotic”. I figure that a fungus person is exotic enough by my own definition.
I’m working on catching up. Over the weekend, I worked with my best friend and partner in crime on our superhero comic book. In that work session, I finalized the design of one of the important early characters: The Recluse. To finish of the drawing session, I did a fast ink drawing to share as my Day 3 drawing.
The inspiration was “boots”. Since we were working on costume designs, and superheros tend to wear boots, I thought this fit well with the prompt.
I was working with a brand new brush, and I didn’t quite have the feel for it yet. It kept behaving in ways that I was expecting. This is also the first time in over a year that I’ve inked with a brush. Despite all that, I’m not disappointed with how it came out.
I’ll add a better scan as soon as I can get to the one at work (I’m working on getting one for the house at the moment. The prompt was “discovery, and I came up with the idea for it while walking the dog this morning. She was doing her usual sniffing, and I realized that it was just enough discovery to give me an idea for a quick drawing in ballpoint pen. Still ink.
I don’t know what the rules are about being late, but I am now late in finishing my day two and day three drawings. I’m still going to publish them and still try to get 31 done this month, and the weekend will help.
I had to work late two days in a row because of an unusual end-of-the month paperwork crunch. Things should get easier.
I haven’t done this before, and it’s been at least a year since I’ve even looked at Instagram, so I don’t remember if I’m allowed to use color or not. So I played around with a little. I probably won’t do it again for the rest of the month- I honestly don’t think I’ll have time. I plan to do much quicker drawings in the future.
So what did I draw? I won’t go into the details here of the dream I had last night, but it involved my grandma. The anniversary of her birthday is this week, and it’s been four years since her passing. In this drawing, my cousin and I are picking blackberries during our annual family camping trip when we were young. Back then, we strayed away from the campgrounds to find these giant berry bushes, and picked as many as we can carry (we didn’t have a backpack, like in the drawing, but “backpack” is the universal inspiration for Day One of Inktober 2024, so there you go). When we returned to camp, my grandma saw our berries, and called us into her tent trailer. She prepared some of the berries that we gathered with sugar and half-and-half. I had never had them prepared that way before, and they were delicious! She told us not to tell our parents that she gave us the sugar and cream, and I never did, heh heh. (Sorry Mom, if you’re reading this right now.)
Something else about this drawing that’s noteworthy: it’s the first digital inking that I’ve ever done. My wife and I just got an iPad with an Apple Pencil, so I figured that I would give it a test run for this event. Honestly, it feels like cheating to be able to erase my inks when I mess up. But because I didn’t need to be so deliberate like I need to be with real ink, I was able to finish a lot quicker than I do on paper. We’ll see what I do moving forward.
And crud: I didn’t finish this post before midnight. Does that mean I didn’t do Inktober right?
Powerhouse is a villain from the comic series Savage Dragon. He was a character that Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen came up with as a kid (hence his ridiculous look). Despite this, he’s a serious threat in the book, and a fan favorite. I love him, and I originally drew this pic when I was in high school. I finished coloring it this week.
I just finished watching Don’t Look up: the film beautifully captures everything that frustrates me about social media.
The first principle of social media: people will follow people because they’re attractive or because they’ve found an echo chamber. Or both. The second principle: they’ll take the word of the people they follow over established expert professionals. In my “real world” job, I am an expert professional. And I find myself constantly at odds, trying to explain to lay people why the armchair experts they found on Tik Tok are incorrect, and that real science doesn’t support anything they’re saying. What the Tik Tok “experts” do say is what their followers are looking to hear. Even when it’s at their own detriment.
Social media loves to downplay the establishment, and traditional accepted expertise. Who do we blame for that? My guess is that when the news media was bought by major corporations, the agenda became a financial bottom line, and not truth and representation of the people. When the media stopped digging for real stories, and favored political agendas, people recognized it’s impotence on some level. So they sought out deeper truths on the Internet. But because there are no standards on the Internet, people seek out the things that the human mind has always sought: confirmation and affirmation. Confirmation Bias is a real, scientific principle, and it will keep people listening to the people who say what they want to hear, and who look like they want to look. Don’t Look Up portrays this beautifully. Great film, just expect to be angered and agitated by the (excellently acted) characters.
They sell this brand at Hispanic supermarkets. This is the equivalent of naming your brand of bread Tee-tee’s. To me it just sounds like subliminal advertising done wrong.
When I attended University, I used to sell knives for this shady pyramid-ish company called Vector. One of the features of their carving knives was the the patented “Double-D blade”. They told us that the blade was intentionally named that way because ‘LoL iT mAkEs YoU tHiNk BoObS sEx SeLLz”. It didn’t help sales. It made selling harder. I made my sales pitch almost exclusively to either women or women and their partners, and naming the blade was awkward at best, and body shaming, sexual aggression at worst.
Subliminal messaging, when done correctly, leave the person thinking about a thing without them knowing why they’re thinking about it. Or at the very least, it leaves them feeling responsible for interpreting something to be sexually when to them it wasn’t intended to be. Like when movie theaters used to splice a single frame advertisement into their movie reels. Using a name that’s also a sex thing is overt: there’s no mistaking that the person intended a double entendre. Frankly, neither is a particularly savory practice. The most honest way to use sex for sales is to just blatantly sell sex.
When selling knives, I stopped naming the blade by name. It made my job more comfortable, and when I felt better about what I was doing, I was a better salesman. It took a little bit longer for me to stop working for the company altogether. As you can imagine, “sLy” product naming wasn’t their only sketch practice.
I’m not sure what year this was taken, but it’s clearly early last century. The fact that the campus looks the exact same, minus the styles dudes are wearing, it pretty damn amazing. To me.
Not gonna lie, though: I might rock a hat like that were I to ever find one. My partner might not be too happy. :p #Brown #brownuniversity
