There is no comic posting on the drawing board today. In the meantime, I heartily suggest checking out the Ghosts of Tiny Animals. It is infrequently updated, but so beautiful.
We are all Alice here
I had this idea, and then I kinda started working on it, and then I put all my messy sketches together and spent a lot of time coloring it, and now I have this. Alice’s tea party, with Alice and Alice and Alice and Alice and Alice. She’s schizophrenic, you know.
Library Archives
Did you know that Libraries have collections of truly interesting and rare materials? That these libraries often digitize and create online collections accessible to anyone? That because of library websites/catalogs and their interaction with search engines most of this material is impossible to simply stumble upon? Allow me to help you trip, with a selection of awesome digitized archives.
- Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections’: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction–images and book illustrations of Death, Magic, and the fantastical.
- The Media History Project – non profit dedicated to digitizing public domain news and media on media industries.
- Cigarette Cards at NYPL Digital Gallery – most definitely not the only thing the NYPL Digital Gallery ‘s got going for it, but a fabulous collection just the same.
- Chronicling America at the Library of Congress – American newspapers from 1836 to 1922, digitized and text searchable. Do you understand how fabulous this is? – especially for the genealogical researcher. If you want to add narrative to your family tree all you need is some names, a location, and some time and I bet you’ll find a birth announcement, party coverage in the social columns, news of a legal dispute over property limits, or something. I did.
- The Petrucci Music Library – scores and recordings of public domain music worldwide.
- University of Florida Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature – remember that picture book that you loved as a child, maybe it was the one that your Mom said had been hers when she was growing up. I imagine there is, at least an alternate edition, digital copy of it here. This one’s mine.
- Daguerreotypes at Harvard – I have always been fascinated with Daguerreotypes – one of the first photography methods available for public consumption and still the details it captures have never been equaled. It’s not unusual that the weave of cloth is even visible in these.
Not everyone can be a library however, the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. has some fabulous antiquities and curious illustrations to peruse. Some of them may even be affordable to some people. And we can never forget the, ever more fabulous, Internet Archive.
Fashion for hunters
Tattoos
Ever since I saw and put my name in for Beautiful Forever at the Light Grey Art Lab, I have been working on a set of tattoos. Now, I didn’t get chosen to participate in Beautiful Forever, but I couldn’t stop. Minus one (and + some details), these are all tattoos that occur on my comic characters. Do you know which one doesn’t belong?
Heavens help me, I’m reading the news
I hate to get all serious and controversial, but I see a growing global trend of preposterous legalities. There has recently been a man in Australia jailed for buying/watching animated sex involving characters like children. It shouldn’t be surprising given Australia’s zero tolerance position (that and more found in this wikipedia article: legal status of cartoon pornography depicting minors). But a whole cacophony of details make this story icky all over.
Before we launch into the meat of them let’s consider how damning the man’s legal/behavior history is with previous convictions for assaulting teenagers. Now that we’ve considered that let’s stop thinking about it. It is not the point here.Continue reading Heavens help me, I’m reading the news
more Buffalo Chucks
Aren’t they great?! I, maybe consciously, modeled Lola on a Dolly Parton/Christina Aguilera love child. Marx is totally Rosario Dawson. And I’m not sure I had an image in mind when I was drawing Vertigo. Her attitude is modeled on a dear friend of mine, but not her looks.
TED-Ed
Was researching for The 25 Lives of Marcus Trapp and found this awesome and educational animation on TED-Ed | A glimpse of teenage life in ancient Rome – Ray Laurence.
Fashion play
Drawing a bunch of characters in indulgent Victorian inspired outfits.
old art
When I was looking for my old cartoon portraits, I ran across these. Ah! Nostalgia.
Excerpt of Penelope Sea and Ocean End
I’ve talked about it, and I have constantly deflected questions and nagging from a friend who thinks it is good and I ‘need to get off my butt and edit it already.’ Penelope Sea and Ocean End is the first book I ever wrote. It’s not even 20,000 words – which is hilarious in light of my NaNoWriMo endeavors.
Well, I can finally say that I have edited it. Just finished. And I have tackled all the things about it that I didn’t like and that had kept me from editing for so long because I thought it was going to be difficult. Silly me.
I want to say ‘project done.’ It feels good. I get to cross something off a list now and go on to finish another unfinished manuscript.
I’ve also been given the order to shop it around to publishers, so I guess I’m going to try that. If I should fail, you can be assured that I’ll just end up posting the entirety right here, like I do with my comic submissions. Until that day, I’ll give you Chapter One.
PENELOPE SEA AND OCEAN END
Chapter 1
Penelope Sea sat alone at the end of a lunch table in the cafeteria of her new elementary school. She hadn’t made any friends yet. She didn’t want to make new friends She wanted to be with her old friends, in her old school, in her old town. All the children here looked at her funny, and the food that the pink-haired lunch lady served didn’t taste right. Although she had only been enrolled in Dolphin Elementary for one week, Penelope decided she definitely did not like it here.
The only thing Penelope did like about having moved towns, moved houses, and moved schools was her very own personal house key. She wore it on a shiny silver chain around her neck. Penelope was only eight. She thought she was special because after school she got to stay at home while her parents worked.
More Sparkles
Portraiture
Long ago and far away when I used MySpace and not Facebook, I only ever had cartoon portraits of myself in my photo albums. I was recently told that these were missed, so I pulled them out of obscurity (they are up on the Art page too).
Free Online Course Materials
Do you want to learn something today? If you are anything like me then you like to gather up little pieces of information like hermit crabs collect junk. But this stuff is far from junk: MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials puts MIT Course Materials online for anyone to access. Crazy awesome, or is it just me? I know I’m not getting the lectures, but dude! Kids pay good money to go to MIT.
Speaking of good money. If you really want lectures, Yale’s got some Open Courses as well.
little obsessions
I am absolutely fascinated by eyewear that is designed to augment our most perfect natural abilities to visually process the world around us. I have much less than perfect natural vision abilities. Some of my most stressful dreams have something to do with driving a speeding car without my glasses. I fantasize about waking up some day without needing to put corrective lenses on. I’m horribly envious of 20/20 vision. And thus, when frolicking through science journals, I am helplessly captivated by contacts and glasses that do even more than ‘fix’ vision.
For instance, over on NewScientist (back in 2011 – hello GReader starred list) there are glasses that read the body language and expression of the person you are interacting with and give you clues about the best way to proceed in your conversation. And then on BBC News, animal trials are wrapping up for contacts that stream emails and text messages directly over our vision of the world around us. I imagine a blending of our physical and online existences. I imagine not knowing which is which until the glasses are off. It makes me think of the anime Dennō Coil. It’s a really good anime. I have to watch it through again. And lest you think my mind is not just a repetitive circle, I am going to dig up some posts from the old Bean on exactly the same topic. After the…Continue reading little obsessions