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
It’s been an incredibly busy past couple of months, but I was able to do some quick deck box decorations. I used markers this time instead of water colors.
One thing that was different this time around in doing art on a box: I drew on older boxes that have already been beat up. I had less investment in the finished product, since it was already something old and well used. As a result, with less emotional investment, I was able to work faster and not worry so much about mistakes. You wouldn’t think so, but markers ended up being faster this time around than watercolors. And I’m not sure if that’s because of the medium, or the emotional investment. With the markers, there was also one fewer steps, as I didn’t bother to seal the boxes using contact paper (moisture doesn’t ruin ink like it it does watercolor). Anyway, I expect more of these to be done, given the speed with which I was able to work.
I’m watching a game Codenames right now, one word is ‘octopus’ and another ‘face’. It occurred to me that their eyes are on either side of their heads, and their mouths are in between their legs. With so many diffuse parts, can they really have a face? When they have legs where their noses should be… I say they’re missing a face.
It’s my first issue of Monster Chompster!!! I created Chompie years ago when I was in college as the main character of a comic strip. I think I drew maybe 20 three-panel strips, and IIRC, like 4 of them were actually printed in the University newspaper (I have a few copies of the papers somewhere). Most of the time that I spent “creating” the character was devoted to building my website, writing up character bios, drawing desktop wallpapers, etc. I talked more about what I planned to do instead of actually doing it.
This time around, I’m doing things differently. So far, I have 5 pages penciled, and the rest of the issue is plotted and more or less scripted. Being that I’m going with a full-on cartoon style, the actual drawing is very fast. The much larger barrier is the emotional resistance that I have. For some reason, I have to push myself to draw each panel. I suspect that maybe it’s because I’ve wanted to see this project done for so long, that I’m terrified of seeing it realized, and that the final product will be less than what I was hoping for. Or that people won’t enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed it in my own head. I don’t know.
The important thing though, is that I’m doing it. Even if it’s slowly progress, at some point I’m expecting to break through the psychological barrier, and will be able to throw down pencils speedily. I’ve got three stories written so far, and my pencils are the biggest barrier to sharing them.
