Yes, I realize I am way behind on these. I’ll catch up somehow!
Program used: Sketchable, Photoshop CC 2015.5
Hardware: Surface Pro 3 and pen
Photoshop was used to crop and resize the image and to add the text.
I bumbled my way through Sketchable, learning a few more things. The following is a very crude depiction of Angry Carrot, with no shading at all. Think of him as an untextured polygon from a late 1980sPC game.
I’ll try to revisit this one later if I make it through all 26.
I actually struggled with this one, even though there are a billion things that start with the letter B.
And then I cheated.
B is for Ball.
Program used: Photoshop CC 2015.5
Cheat used: created ball using ellipse tool. Freehand drawing is for losers.
More cheating: used the Lighting Effects filter to create a pseudo-3D effect
In other words, I used about the least amount of my own minimal artistic talent as possible. I’m okay with that because I dig the totally retro border and Cooper Black font. Also, you can see the pixels on the ball because I was too lazy to figure out how to apply antialiasing. That makes it more retro.
I am going to do the old shtick of going through the alphabet and draw something each day that starts with the appropriate letter.
Today, A is for Apple.
Drawn in: Paper (iOS app)
Tool used: My finger
The combination of an inadequate tool (my finger) with inadequate drawing skill (my brain) has produced something vaguely reminiscent of an apple. It could also be a tomato. Possibly a short-stemmed cherry. Maybe an apple.
Probably an apple.
Edit: I went back and edited the image using Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5, adding a snazzy (?) red border and explanatory text.
By request, I did a drawing of a robot eating a fork with a spoon. I call it Robot Eating Fork With Spoon. This is my virgin effort using Sketchable on my Surface Pro 3. It’s kind of slapped together.
I draw forks the same way Rob Liefeld draws feet.
I can see how someone with actual talent could make something nice in Sketchable, though. It’s a pretty nice program.
More scans of my doodlings from days of yore!
The Gum Gum People were small, pink elastic beings that giggled a lot (specifically “HEE! HEE!”) and in a handwritten and unfinished screenplay for what would have been the best Gum Gum People movie of all time, they plot to take over Earth, without having any real malicious intent.
I occasionally doodled out the GGP (if I write it as The GPP it looks a bit like a funky band name) and below are a few sketches that appeared to be a part of a series explaining them, perhaps as a primer before people went to see Invasion of the Gum Gum People. By the third sketch (not included here because it’s little more than a few errant lines) I either ran out of ideas, enthusiasm or pencils.
Sketch 1:
Sketch 2:
The GGP getting scratched looks positively delighted. It almost makes me want to try using a toothbrush the next time I’m itchy.
You may have noticed the first drawing looks a lot dirtier. This is because it was on the top of the drawing pad and picked up something like 20 years of crud that the scanner accurately captured. Hooray for technology. (I chose not to clean it up because cleaning up art can have unintended consequences.)
After toiling away on my Surface Pro 3, first using the included Sketchpad app (which is pretty bare bones) before switching to Photoshop (which has 5,000 pounds of blubber on its bones), I have drawn a potato.
An amazing potato. It sits on an abstract landscape that invokes memories of the family farm. If you didn’t have a family farm it may instead invoke memories of bad drawings you did when you were a kid, which this essentially is, minus the kid part. I’m a little out of practice.
Secretly I wanted to draw Super Spud but balked because trying to do a simple shape and then adding arms, legs and a face to it was too intimidating after years of not-drawing and even more years of not-drawing-in-computer-programs-I’m-barely-familiar-with.
Nonetheless, here is potato. More to come!
For December I am going to use my Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 3 Pen to make a Surface Pro Drawing of something or other once per week for the duration of the month. It may be a tree or a potato or perhaps the moons of Uranus (hehehe) but it will be something and each of the four drawings will be amazing*.
Starting tomorrow.
* amazing subject to availability and may be shipped at a later time
Here are the two remaining Mac and Tosh strips from the fantastic but short-lived Mac and Tosh Comics collection.
The first, “A very merry quite contrary scrumpdilliishus meal” starts with a title that makes little to no sense then segues into a heart-warming tale of love and acceptance in which Tosh gains weight in order to match the ample size of his girlfriend. Although it reads today like an affirming take on accepting people for who and what they are, at the time I probably just found fat jokes hilarious. I was an easily amused kid.
The second strip, “A ‘wet trip'” is very much accurately titled, as it recounts Mac and Tosh’s disastrous attempt to boat to Hawaii. I apparently did not have a dictionary handy to confirm how to spell “Hawaii.” Or a lot of other words. Even in the few strips presented you can already see how Tosh is always optimistic, even in the face of tragedy and despair, while Mac is constantly skeptical and cynical. How very odd couple! I didn’t actually watch a lot of The Odd Couple, though its theme of “opposites attract” obviously resonated with me for some reason. If I had to speculate it probably began when I sat down and asked myself, “How can I do a comic with two stick figures but make them look different? I could give one a hat. But hats are tricky to draw. I know, one will be less stick-like than the other. Genius!” And from there the personalities of the two practically wrote themselves.
I like the puzzled fish at the end, likely reflecting the take of anyone reading the comic.
Here’s another scan from the rare, coveted Mac and Tosh comic book collection, of which there exists but a single copy (because I did not have access to a photocopier as an eight year old kid).
This is a heartwarming Christmas tale. Or rather, it is a needlessly cruel Christmas tale, as it openly mocks Tosh’s belief in Santa Claus. The best part of the comic may be that it clearly identifies who Tosh is, ergo who Mac is as well.
But there’s so much more. The world’s best Santa Claus costume. The public ridicule for believing in Santa and subsequent physical illness when being told the truth about the jolly old elf. The complete non-sequitur involving “super candy,” as if I had a panel quota to meet, the tantalizing cliffhanger. Read on and see, indeed.
It was time to test out the scanner of the new multi-function Brother MFC-9130CW or as I like to call it, the heavy thing that sits on the corner of the desk behind me, so I grabbed a collection of Mac and Tosh comics I made when I was a wee one. As you will see below, my sense of humor was already suitably dark, albeit somewhat unsophisticated. The bleed-through is an accurate reflection of the thin and worn paper, hence I’ve made no attempt to fix it.
I dated some of my earliest comics but not this series. There are several important clues, though. The lowercase “a” is written the “normal” way and I switched to the “fancy” version around the age of 10 or 11. The appalling spelling (“heavan” and “hear we come”) also indicates the period before I suddenly developed an internal spelling checker. I’m going to say I was around 8 or 9 years old at the time this epic was penned.
Speaking of penned, I bravely inked the comic without drawing it in pencil first. Note the very first word was a mistake that I crossed out and corrected. Perhaps white-out did not exist back then. You can also see the classic “make a balloon then scrunch the words to fit inside it” technique favored by many budding comic strip auteurs.
Sadly, Parts 1 and 2 seem to have gone missing. One can only imagine the tense build up leading to the eventual catastrophic demise of the characters.
Also, I can’t recall which was Mac and which was Tosh. Their names are directly ripped off of the Goofy Gophers featured in Warner Brothers cartoons, of which I was (and remain) a big fan. At the time I probably thought of it as an homage. At least I didn’t also make them gophers. Their explosive deaths could have been inspired by one of many Warner Brothers cartoons but most likely something from the Roadrunner series. I like how either Mac or Tosh looks on the bright side even as they let slip their mortal coils.
The last three panels are scratched in with pencil and I have no idea what the cryptic “TERRI DID THE” message refers to (Terri is one of my sisters). I also have no idea what the circle, #, square and 61 are references to or why they are repeated twice. It’s like clues to a murder mystery, but the only deaths I know of are in the panels above these would-be clues.
Anyway, I’m going to recreate these strips to see how they’d look from an adult perspective. My guess is sad, but in a different and less-cute way.
Did you know a ring-tailed cat is not a cat? Did you know I sketched a ring-tailed cat back in junior high and upon looking at the sketch today I had no idea what it was, except that it was small and furry and possibly a little mean? Did you know that I discovered it was a ring-tailed cat (which is not a cat but a relative of the raccoon) by doing a search for “ring-tailed animals” and coming across a similar image?
Now you know. Hopefully these trivial bits of information didn’t shove out something way more important from your brain.
Note the small backwards check in the lower right of the drawing. I think this was my teacher’s way of saying, “I acknowledge your work but dare not comment on it.” Which would be fair, really. I’ve never been more than a mediocre visual artist.
The scan is actually a photo I took with my iPhone 6, which I then cropped on my PC. Isn’t technology grand? The original image is 5×7 inches. Also, the ring-tailed cat appears to be missing a leg, a recurring theme in my animal sketches, apparently.
And here’s the same sketch using the Composition filter from the iOS app Prisma. These filters are so sophisticated they can make my trashy junior high art actually look kind of neat. Did I mention how grand technology is?
Way back when parachute pants were not worn ironically (or were still worn at all), I made a series of comics called The Ever-Continuing Saga of the Round Balls. I did 11 issues in all, each lovingly handcrafted by hand. The ongoing story was just a bunch of nonsense to allow for topical jokes and sight gags. The balls were on a quest to find Pia Zadora. For people born in this century, she was the 1980s equivalent of Paris Hilton, more or less.
The cast of characters was large and impressive. There were magic talking bean bags and mice, nefarious enemies in the form of rocks, adventures on tropic islands and more.
I have lost all 11 issues. I have no idea where they are. It makes me sad.
I tried to revive the comic about a year after the last issue but it never took. Below is a gallery of all that remains of those unfinished Round Balls comics. I’d say I’d go back and revive the comic except it was a lot of work and I ain’t no artist.
But it was fun and satisfying at the time.
