Author: Cynical Woman

Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.
No comments

ACW 296 – What was the future supposed to be?

  By , , , , , ,
Cynical Woman!

Click on the image to see it full-sized!

Did you ever have a clear idea of what the future was supposed to be like? I never did, to be honest. I can’t think about the future and say where I’ll be in five years, or even in one year. I’ve never been able to do that. I can make plans, sure. I make plans all the time. But I have learned from hard experience that nothing ever goes the way I plan it.

So over the years, I’ve tried to learn to just roll with whatever happens. As a teen, I never could have imagined myself serving in the military, but I did – 11 years in the Army Reserves. As a college student, I couldn’t see myself married with kids, and yet Hubster and I celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary last June, with our kids in attendance. And had anyone ever suggested that I would become a Girl Scout troop leader and cookie mom, I would have laughed in their face. Yet now I am gearing up for my fifth year as troop leader and my seventh year as cookie mom.

I never had any idea what I was going to do with my life. I had no plans for what kind of career I’d have, where I’d live, what I’d do. And yet somehow, it all turned out pretty well. I still have no clear idea of where I’m going with my life, beyond the fact that I want to do a lot of drawing and crafting and take care of Hubster and the kids. And I think that’s okay. I think if I’d ever had a plan, it would have all somehow gone horribly wrong, or I would have died of stress from trying to make it work. I am not a planner. I am a “seat-of-the-pants” kind of person. Good thing I have tough pants!

No comments

Practicing Drawing – Flower Power

  By , ,

Yay! Another blog post! As promised, I have done more practice drawing and I’m ready to share some of the results with you all. Again, I’m working my way through Craft-a-Doodle by Jenny Doh. There is a list of 75 exercises and drawing prompts in this book, gathered from 18 artists. No two artists draw exactly alike, but everyone is focusing on the doodle style of drawing, which I enjoy. Why, you may ask? I’ve always loved to doodle. Doodles are fun little drawings of little or no consequence that I can do any time, on any handy scrap of paper. And because they’re of little or no consequence (i.e. I’m not making art to sell), I don’t feel a lot of pressure when I scribble away at them. I don’t need to carefully pencil my doodles, I can just go straight to ink (always my favorite part of drawing comics). I can use any colors without worrying about the overall color scheme of an entire comic strip. I don’t have to worry about scripting anything, and I don’t even have to think about whether what I’m drawing makes any sense. So doodling is a judgement-free zome for me!!!

Or at least it should be. The one thing I find my self struggling with as I go through these exercises is to not use the undo button. Again, I’m drawing these using Paper 53 on my iPad. Paper is a pretty basic drawing app with some decent natural media style tools, but they’re not the most precise tools, and I have no control over the size of the brush tips, the opacity of the color I lay down, or much of anything else. I can zoom in to work on something, but not as far as I’m used to doing in a drawing app. So, I’m using some pretty basic tools with very limited control, and I am making a lot of mistakes as I draw, which I hate. And what happens every time I make a mistake? I hit the undo button, which goes entirely against what I’m trying to accomplish with my practice drawing.

I don’t want to be perfect when I draw. I want to be good, and I want to get faster, which means learning to deal with mistakes and accept them as they happen, instead of bogging down the whole drawing process by constantly undoing my work in an attempt to make it perfect. I’m having to fight with myself not to hit the undo button, and even then, sometimes I can’t live with the line I’ve just drawn or the color I just put down, and instead of just making it work, or accepting it and moving on, I undo and undo and undo and undo…

Ugh. It’s infuriating. But one habit I need to break is hitting that undo button, so that’s why I’m doing this drawing practice.

Okay, enough yakking. Time for a couple of pics. The exercises I worked on this week had me making  sprays of flowers and drawing more elaborate stylized flowers. I love drawing flowers, so I enjoyed this week. Here are two of the drawings I produced.

Floral Spray

BeeYOUtiful Roses


Fancy Flower

Fancy Flower


I did take a little time with the second one to pick out the colors I wanted to use. I’m fussy about colors and I wanted colors for this that would contrast well but still work together. I like the final product. It reminds me of 1970s kitchen wall paper for some reason. That or Pennsylvania Dutch decor.

After playing around with flowers on the iPad, I decided to try drawing on ACTUAL PAPER with ACTUAL PENS AND MARKERS. Here’s how that turned out!

Floral Card

It”s a greeting card!


I have so much more control over actual paper and pen, and I had no problems not undoing anything I did on this card because THERE WASN’T ANY UNDO BUTTON!!!

Anyway, that’s this week’s drawing practice. I hope you like it. If you’re curious about the book Craft-a-Doodle, you can get it here.

No comments

ACW Episode 295 – Enjoy the ride?

  By , , , , , , , ,
Webcomic!

Click on the image to view it full-sized!

Seriously, I can’t even ride on the swings anymore without getting queasy. It’s so sad the things I can’t manage to do anymore. Although being married to the Hubster is still a lot of fun and adventure! Twenty-three years, folks! Twenty-three amazing years 🙂

No comments

Practicing Drawing – Lovely Ladies

  By , , ,

So I mentioned the other day that I was going to start blogging about my drawing practice. I honestly don't believe I do enough drawing, and I want to change that. I have several books in my library that offer exercises for drawing and doodling, and so I've decided to work through at least part of each book and share the results here.

The book I'm starting with is Craft-a-Doodle by Jenny Doh. I love doodling. It's a painless way to practice drawing because I don't feel so emotionally invested in the process of drawing, yet once it's done, I'm usually pretty happy with the end results. I think it's that idea that “it's just a doodle” that allows me to relax and draw. Unlike when I'm working on the webcomic. I tend to get way too tense and judgemental then.

I've worked my way through the first chapter in Craft-a-Doodle. Each chapter is made up of prompts and exercises by a different artist. Chapter one offers exercises by Cori Dantini, including drawing faces, owls, and flowers. The exercises are pretty straight-forward, but the results are great! Here the doodles I did for this chapter:

Lovely Ladies

Lovely Ladies

 

Owls

Owls

 

Flowers

Flowers

I drew these on my iPad, using Paper51. It's a nice app with some decent natural media tools. It's not the best app for drawing, but it does have the advantage of a notebook format, allowing me to keep a group of drawings together.

I plan to work through the next chapter over the course of the week, and have another update next Tuesday!

 

No comments

Some updates coming to the Cynical Woman blog

  By ,

I know I've been very quiet on the blog the last several weeks. It's partly because life gets so busy, but it's also partly because it's been a while since I've written and scheduled blog posts in advance. There was a time, a long time ago, when I would spend all day Sunday writing a week's worth of blog posts, based on notes I had written during the week. In some cases, I could get two weeks worth of posts knocked out with no problem, so there was always something up on the blog.

Problems started, however, when I started getting bored with what I was blogging about. I ran out of ideas for certain regular topics and never found anything new to replace that. And then life started getting busier and busier and I just let the whole blogging thing slide. Occasionally, I would rally back and put out posts for a month or more, based on a theme for that month, writing a new post every night before going to bed. But even that petered out after a while when I realized I didn't like writing a post before bedtime every night.

So what to do? I've decided to go back to pre-scheduled posts, picking all new topics that I like. I've also decided that about three months, I need to spend a day reviewing those topics to see if it's time to change them up. And I'm going to start writing down ideas for new topics in a notebook, so I'm not stuck for new ideas when I need them. But what topics to start with now?

Well, I need to do more drawing practice anyway, so I thought I'd start there. I've got a number of books on drawing and doodling that I can work through, and as I do so, I can post the results here. I can also do a sort of review of the book in question as I go, to let folks know what I like about a particular art book, and whether I think it's effective.

Another thing I may blog about is some of the activities I do with Girl Scouts, specifically the DIY and craft activities. I've had some fun making stuff with the girls, and there are some great how-tos out there that I'd like to try with the troop. I can take some time to try this tutorials and blog about how they work, and hopefully other folks who have kids or volunteer with them can benefit from that.

Finally, I will continue to work on “The Adventures of Cynical Woman” webcomic. After the current story line wraps up, I may make some style changes to the artwork which will hopefully allow me to get it produced faster without a reduction in the quality of the art. And I may introduce a new comic for a bit, a single panel webcomic that's been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. I'm still playing with the idea, so we'll have to see.

So that's the plan to kick the blog back into gear. Hopefully this all works out and you guys enjoy the new posts 🙂

No comments

ACW Episode 294 – How old are you?!

  By , , , ,
Cynical Woman!

Click on the image to see it full-sized!

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get a new episode up. When summer break started, my sort-of  normal schedule just fell apart. We were out of town most of June. We had a lovely time, visiting family, going to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas, and lots of other fun places. But then we finally came home this week, and I buckled down and got this episode done.

We’ll see if I can continue to get my work done and get back to a more regular publishing schedule!