alunclewe

[alunclewe]

Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to attend the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop this week, because I'm working this afternoon. (Well... there's a slight possibility I may be able to make it if it turns out to be a very short workday. But it's unlikely.) But I did attend the workshop last week, and, uh, didn't get around to posting my comic until now.

Last week's workshop was hosted by Anand Shenoy (@anandpagalkutta on Instagram), and the theme was "aimless comics", basically just start with a grid of 2x4 panels and... draw a kind of an aimless story, without worrying about where it's going. The only further restriction was that there should be at least two panels with dialogue.

Anyway, when not given specific direction I guess my default tends toward drawing monsters, so here's what I ended up with.

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SAW Workshop #SAWComics #Friday Night Comics #Comics Workshop #ComicsWorkshop #FridayNightComics #comics #monster #comic

[alunclewe]

It has been once again way too long since I posted anything here, and I would have preferred that the end to my absence not be marked by abstract scribbles, but here we are.

For the first time in... quite a while, I attended the Sequential Artist Workshop Friday Night Workshop tonight (I'd been working Friday afternoons lately). This week it was hosted by Mara Ramirez (@forever4pm on Instagram), and the project was to just... draw to music. They played four different songs, and we were supposed to... sort of dance in drawing, just draw whatever abstract shapes seemed to go with the music.

I'm not going to reveal what the four songs were here (and I'm pretty sure there's no way to guess), but you can search out the video of the workshop on the Sequential Artist Workshop YouTube channel if you're curious...

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SAWComics #SAW Comics #SequentialArtistsWorkshop #comics workshop #comic #comics #Wait are these really comics? #Whatever

[alunclewe]

Still trying to get in the habit of updating more often, so here's something else I did (somewhat) recently but never uploaded. I've been (slowly) working on making animated images of characters for the Cast page in my webcomic Soup (which doesn't exist yet—I mean, the webcomic does; it's at https://www.soupcomic.com ; but the Cast page doesn't exist yet), so here's one that I'm pretty sure I haven't posted yet: Lambor, god of light. (I think I may have made his upper body a little too thin, though; I should probably tweak this a bit.)

I was going to add more animation, but haven't gotten to it yet, so right now he just... blinks.

#Soup #comic #webcomic #Soup the Comic Strip #Lambor #character #animation

[alunclewe]

Trying to get in the habit of posting more here, so here are some other things I've been working on lately. I have a website where I've put up all the 24-hour comics I've done, d24comic.com, but right now it's very ugly and bare-bones, and I want to make it more presentable. As one step in that direction, I want to make different page backgrounds for each comic there, so here are two of the backgrounds I made, for the 24-hour comics "The Kung Fu Cavemen Meet The Hyperhuman" and "Roboghost in The Net of the Damned". (Most of my 24-hour comics do not have such long titles; I'm not sure why I decided to bestow such lengthy titles on these two comics.)

#comics #comic #24-hour comic #24-hour comics #24 hour comics #24 hour comic #art #Adobe Illustrator #Illustrator

[alunclewe]

Running into a very weird problem with Adobe Illustrator lately. The first time I try to save any document, I get an error message: "Can't save the document '[document name]'. This file cannot be found."

...Of course it can't be found; I haven't saved it yet!

(It always works on the second try, but still, it's a bit of an inconvenience, because I have to navigate to the correct directory and type in the filename all over again...)

#Adobe Illustrator #Illustrator #Computer issues

[alunclewe]

So, I've really been neglecting this blog lately; sorry; but I've had a lot to deal with. One project that's been taking up a lot of my time is an educational video on physics I'd committed to create for an online class. But then, I guess I could have been posting some of the animations I made from that video. Like this one. Yes, this is an animation from an educational physics video. I will not explain the context.

#video #animation #animated #spooky tree #spooky #Toon Boom #Toon Boom Harmony

[alunclewe]

So, uh, I have still not been good so far this year about posting to this account, but today I participated once again in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop, so... I guess I'll post what I drew there, anyway. This week the host was Maureen Burdock (@maureenburdock on Instagram), and the theme was "Meet Your Sleep".

The first page is just a warmup where we were asked to draw two panels, draw in the first panel whatever random object first occurred to us, then add a word describing how we're currently feeling, then in the second panel combine the word and the object in some way.

The second page was about... personifying your sleep, in six panels. Panel 1: Draw your sleep as a character. Panel 2: Draw yourself in relation to your sleep. Panel 3: Draw yourself in a conversation to your sleep. Panel 4: What does your sleep say to you? Panel 5: How could you improve your relationship with your sleep? Panel 6: One last panel of you next to your sleep.

I'm not sure why I decided my sleep should be a tentacled monster. It just seemed to fit, somehow.

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SAW Workshop #SAW Comics #SAWcomics #comic #Friday Night Workshop #FridayNightWorkshop #monster #sleep

[alunclewe]

Well, I'd really hoped to post more often in 2024 than I did in the last part of 2023, and so far I am not off to a great start. But anyway, I did participated once again today in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop, so I guess I may as well post what I drew there.

This week the workshop was hosted by Yasmeen Abedifard (@yasmeen.abedi on Instagram), and the theme was the rules of comics, and when not to follow them. There were three "warm-up" activities for which we were given five minutes each, and then a main activity for which we had ten. The first warmup was just a two-panel comic with three dialogue balloons; the second a two-panel comic with non-rectangular panels; the third a four-panel comic without gutters. Finally, we were tasked with drawing a comic that broke the rules in one (or more) of the following ways: No dialogue, no characters, no panels, fixed perspective, fixed panel size, no gutters, only spreads, backwards narrative, or no narrative. It's hard to make out because of the size and the sketchiness, but my last "comic" is supposed to show a bunch of vignettes of investigators exploring a haunted house and failing to spot the ghosts; it has no narrative, no dialogue, and at least arguably no panels, though I guess you could also argue the rooms of the house sort of function as panels.

I really am going to try to post more in the near future than I have been; we shall see how that goes...

#comic #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #Sequential Artists Workshop #SequentialArtistsWorkshop #SAWcomics #SAW comics #comics workshop

[alunclewe]

Okay, I still have been very busy lately and I haven't been posting here; sorry; I hope things will turn around in the new year. But anyway, today I participated once again in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop. It was hosted this week by Breena Nuñez (www.breenache.com), and the project was, basically, to draw a four-panel comic about your family's migration experience: where your family came from, memories of your first home, etc.

I don't have much of a migration story, per se; my parents still live in the same house they lived in since before I was born. Sure, if you go enough generations back, my ancestors came from other countries—England, Sweden, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Wales—but my family doesn't really carry on any traditions from any of those places, and they don't really talk about them. So, well, I did what I could.

(Given that I was drawing this digitally, I probably should have literally copied and pasted the houses in the second panel; it would have let me do it much faster and gone along with the theme of the panel. But I didn't think of that until I was already well into drawing them. Oh well.)

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SequentialArtistsWorkshop #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #Comics Workshop #ComicsWorkshop #comic

[alunclewe]

Yikes, it's been a long time since I've posted here. Things have been tough lately and I've had a lot to deal with. As I've mentioned before, I've been in a really bad financial situation due to the WGA and then SAG-AFTRA strikes (once again, it's not the unions I blame for this; it's the AMPTP for dragging things out and refusing for so long to negotiate in good faith). Well, the strikes are finally over, but I'm not completely out of the woods yet; I have a lot of debt to pay off, and I'm still not in great financial shape... but at least things are starting to look up.

Anyway, today I participated once again today in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop (I hadn't for a while just because I happened to be working most Friday afternoons lately). Today it was hosted by SAW founder Tom Hart, who I gather stepped in at the last minute when the invited guest was ill. The project was to make some drawings with a stylized, symbolic look reminiscent of ancient petroglyphs, but related to the artist's own life. First we were asked to make three such drawings representing our childhood, adulthood, and old age, and then a single, long, linear drawing representing our lives as a whole, and perhaps drawing on symbols from the previous drawings—and including observers looking at the drawings.

If anyone's curious what my drawings represent and what they say about my life, I guess I'll put a full explanation behind a cut...

So, in the childhood drawing, the large figure, of course, represents me; I gave myself a big head because frankly I think I was a pretty arrogant child. Anyway, as a child I spent a lot of time writing stories and planning out computer games (that I had no idea how to make), so the figures on either side represent characters from my projects; their heads are missing to represent the fact that the projects were unfinished, and there are lines connecting them to represent that some of them were connected in the same fictional universes.

The left side of the adulthood drawing represents college. I'm afraid it's perhaps rather overly literal; the buildings at the bottom represent, well, the actual college; the figure in the lower left is a very crude depiction of a statue of the college mascot that occupies a central location of the campus (Tommy Trojan; I went to USC). As for the sun figure above that, that represents, uh, the sun (like I said, it's literal); as a grad student I was a part of the USC Space Sciences Department and did my dissertation on solar radiation (or at least tried to; I never finished my dissertation, so I never earned my doctorate, though I'm not sure what I'd have done with it if I had).

The right side represents my attempt to turn back toward artistic pursuits. The symbols to my right are supposed to be a paintbrush, representing art; a clapboard, representing movies; and, uh, a twenty-sided die, representing role-playing games (and in this context meant in particular to represent not playing role-playing games, but the creation of role-playing games and supplements, which is something I... want to do but haven't finished anything yet).

Finally, the bottom drawing is the "adulthood" drawing, and is perhaps a bit overly optimistic. The figures from my childhood drawing return, but this time complete with heads, representing my hope that by my old age I'll have finally finished some of my projects and put them out there in the world. As for those blocky shapes in the background—uh, those represent VR buildings, because there are some things I want to do with VR; I don't know; look, time in these Friday Night Workshops is very limited so it's not like I have the leisure to carefully plan out what I'm drawing.

And of course the second page is the representation of my life. On the far left is child me, with many worlds and characters in my head. Then college, with figures with robes and mortarboards pointing in judgment, and then again the figure of the sun. Then I'm standing in front of a blackboard representing my teaching career, and to my side are various simple machines representing physics, the subject I've taught. And then once again we get to my perhaps optimistic vision of the future, where there are once again many worlds and characters, but this time not just contained inside my head but radiating outward to be shared with the world.

Okay, yeah, I don't know; it's self-indulgent, but I think that was kind of the nature of the project, and anything autobiographical kind of tends to be that anyway.

#SAW Comics #SAWComics #Friday Night Comics #petroglyphs #Sequential Artists Workshop #FridayNightComics #Comics Workshop #ComicsWorkshop

[alunclewe]

So, I participated again today in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop, hosted this week by Kit Fraser (@kitcadoodle on Instagram). This week, participants first did a warmup consisting of drawing a simple scribble that corresponded to some emotion, and then expanding that scribble into a character of some kind. (My chosen emotion was "tired"; the original scribble is the squiggly line extending from the tip of the beard to the top of the nose.) The second and larger project was to draw a three-panel comic with a building as a main character.

Yeah, a disproportionate amount of my few posts on Tumblr lately have been from the Friday Night Workshop. Sorry; I want to post more, but I'm still kind of going through some hard times right now; hopefully things will get better soon...

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SequentialArtistsWorkshop #SAWComics #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #Comic

[alunclewe]

I once again participated this week in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop. This week the event was hosted by Lillie J. Harris (@lilliejharris on Instagram), and the prompt was just to draw a comic about an unfortunate event you'd experienced.

Given the limited time on the workshop, I probably spent way too much time with the writing and layout and left myself too little time for the drawing, but oh well. (In the interests of accuracy, I even looked back through my old emails to look up the flight number and the exact times of the delays. This was probably unnecessary.)

#Sequential Artists Workshop #SAW Comics #SAWComics #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #comic #airport #alrline

[alunclewe]

So, I did once again get a comic done on 24-Hour Comics Day, and this morning I finally got around to getting the whole thing online. Pictured above is the title page (I'm not crazy about the title, but at one point I decided I was spending way too much time trying to think of a good title and ought to just pick a title even if I wasn't particularly fond of it and get on with drawing the comic); you can see the whole comic at https://d24comic.com/Night .

(The comic was drawn at a 24-Hour Comics Day event at the Albuquerque Public Library, hosted by the independent comics shop 7000 B.C.)

#24-Hour Comics Day #24 hour comic #24-hour comic #7000 bc #7000 B.C. #comic #24 hour comics day

[alunclewe]

I want to get back into posting other things (such as things that are drawn in more than a few minutes), but I've still got a lot to deal with at the moment... but in the meantime, I did attend the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop again this week. The host this time was Amy Kurzweil (@amykurzweil on Instagram), and there were two main parts to today's workshop (not counting a bit about stream-of-consciousness writing to generate ideas). First, we were supposed to take one minute to draw ourselves as a robot. (One minute is, of course, not much time, hence the sketchiness of the drawing.) Second, we were to take twelve minutes to draw a four-panel comic about a robot. (There was a little more to it than that, but that was the gist.)

Anyway, I haven't been posting much lately, but I'll definitely have something to post next week, since this weekend is 24-Hour Comics Day, and I'm participating in that, as I have been every year since 2006. Not sure I'll get around to posting the entire comic right away, but I should be able to at least get the title page up on Monday as a teaser. I may also get some in-progress shots up tomorrow or Sunday, but no promises.

#Sequential Artists Worshop #sequentialartistsworkshop #SAWcomics #robot #comic #robots #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #Comics Workshop #comicsworkshop

[alunclewe]

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in a while; sorry. Things have been tough lately with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes meaning there hasn't been much work, so that's put me under a lot of stress—though it looks like the light at the end of the tunnel is finally within sight. (Once again, I place the blame for how long the strike has dragged on firmly on the AMPTP; I completely support the striking unions. (As I think I've mentioned before, I'm actually a SAG-AFTRA member myself, though even before the strike I hadn't really done any acting work in a while (and, uh, I'm a bit behind on my dues payment), and that's not how I make my living... but my work as a studio teacher was of course affected by the strikes.))

But anyway, this Friday I once again participated in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night Comics workshop. It's the first time I'd been able to make it there in a while because the last few Fridays I'd been working at that time (work has been slow, but not entirely nonexistent; I'd still been getting some work on indie films and student films that weren't affected by the strikes, and what relatively little work I'd been getting happened to fall disproportionately on Fridays for whatever reason). This week the workshop was hosted by Eli Nixon (@ramshackleenterprises on Instagram), and, well, there were multiple parts, so it'll take some explaining.

First, participants were asked to take a minute and a half to draw a bunch of mammals in a rectangular frame—any mammals, just focusing on getting them down and not on refined quality of the art. Then we were asked to do the same thing for arthropods (not the term they used), for birds, and for plants and fungi. We we then asked to pick any two organisms (not the term they used) from our four drawings, and draw two frames of them in different positions. And then we were asked to add the creatures' thoughts to the first drawing, and dialogue to the second. (If I'd known we were going to be adding dialogue, I might not have chosen a mushroom as one of my organisms.) And then we were asked to pick another creature from our drawings and draw it in three different positions in three panels, and then go back and add thoughts or dialogue to those panels. So… anyway, here's what I ended up with. (Regarding the last three-panel thing, I had chosen a kiwi, and decided that since kiwis are best known for being birds that can't fly, I'd have the kiwi focusing on what it can do.)

Anyway, hopefully I'll be posting more often in the near future; I'm still struggling a bit right now, but with the end of the strikes in sight things may be turning around soon.

#animals #comics #Adobe Illustrator #Friday Night Comics #FridayNightComics #Sequential Artists Workshop #SAWComics #comics workshop

[alunclewe]

Okay, so most of my free time this month (such as it is) has still been devoted to getting my webcomic up, but while the comics have been updating daily on the webcomic's site (https://www.soupcomic.com), I haven't been posting them here because, well, that seems kind of redundant. Still, I do want to post something here, so here's another work in progress. This drawing isn't done yet, but it's a take on a character that appeared in one drawing in a book from the early 80s. Bonus points to anyone who can identify the book.

(Ultimately, this drawing is going to be part of an animation in a YouTube video, but I have no idea how long it's going to be till that actually comes out.)

#drawing #Harmony #Toon Boom Harmony #monster #Dungeons & Dragons #D&D #Lord Bone-ity #(That's what the character is going to be called in the animation) #(He's not named in the book)

[alunclewe]

Well, that's weird... I could have sworn I posted this on Friday, but I don't see it in my timeline, so I'm not sure what happened.

Anyway, on Friday I participated again in the @sequentialartistsworkshop Friday Night comics, hosted this time by SAW founder Tom Hart.

The project was to draw a negotiation with AI, incorporating one thing humans want AI to do, and one thing the AI itself wants to do. I did kind of a science-fiction comic about robots sent to colonize a gas giant uninhabitable by humans…

#sequential artists workshop #friday night comics #fridaynightcomics #SAW comics #SAWcomics #comic #AI #robots #science fiction