Saturday Morning Cartoons

Megan's out of town, and I thought I'd better stop sulking about it. I decided to practice some comic art. This is one of my hobbies, and I'm timing myself to see how long it takes to complete a full-color frame like this, just so I have an idea of what to expect when I make a "real" comic. Hey, maybe I'll turn this into a comic, but for now it's just words I picked that seemed to add to a practice image.


(Click to see full-size)

The thing that amazes me about comics is, you can use words to build an image that the reader can't see. You can't see a hatch, and you don't know what the legend might be, but the words force you to fill out the story inside your head.

Elapsed time: One Sherlock Holmes film and one movie about a smart dog.

-Marc

Sketching and the beach

We're getting ready to go camping on the beach in a week or so, and I'm excited. I love going to the coast - it's a break for the mind, and camping on the beach is lovely. If you feel like you're laying in an uncomfortable spot, just wiggle back and forth a bit until the sand beneath you is like one of those contour matresses. :-)

When we go to the beach, I like to take my sketchbook along to record places, things, and people. Since I do commercial illustration work as part of my job, it helps me keep in practice, too.

There is a really magical cottage on part of the northern California coast, and I love to look at it. Here's a sketch I made of it, then scanned into the computer:

Isn't it cool how it's perched right there at the edge of a cliff? How awesome would it be to vacation in a little place like that? I didn't have much time to complete the sketch, so here's a photo of it that I took earlier:


Crashing waves...sharp rocks...wind-blown trees. Maybe nobody lives there - maybe somebody just built it so they could get rich selling calendar photos of it? :-)

In my sketchbook, there's a huge portion of that page missing. Before I sketched this cottage, I drew a boy and a girl sitting together on the beach, talking. Later that day, the father of the girl in the drawing asked if he could pay me for it! I guess it was a special moment for the girl and he and his wife wanted to give the drawing to her, framed, as a birthday present. I thought it was such a neat idea that I was happy to cut the page up right there. The gap in the page reminds me that even a little drawing can make someone happy.

Someday I'll have to share my airport drawings...some of the people who were at the airport would probably be pretty surprised to know that they were captured on paper while they talked on their cell phones, or drooled all over themselves during a short nap in the terminal. ;-)

Can't wait to go to the beach!

-Marc