Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.
I'm still recovering from being sick. Fortunately, there's only a couple more weeks left of Girl Scout cookie season and I'm starting to get some down time. I am drawing the next comic, but in the meantime, Princess gave me this to share with everyone…
The Goonie Bird!
Actually, I don't know what Princess calls this, but to me, it's a Goonie Bird, and a very lovely one at that. I hope you all enjoy it!
I know I'm way behind at this point on both webcomics. I apologize. I am working on them. However, I've been having health problems since September. I've been to see my general practitioner, a rheumatologist, etc., and still have no idea what's going on. And new symptoms keep popping up the longer this goes on.
I am half-way through the pencils for the current episode of “Adventures of Cynical Woman,” and almost have the new character made for “Bitchcraft.” As soon as I get either webcomic done, I will post it. In the meantime, I have hired a couple of guest artists to help me fill in the blanks.
So, this week's episode of “Adventures of Cynical Woman” is drawn by…
Pixie!
This is Pixie's rendition of an episode of “Doctor Who” that we recently watched. You can see the Dalek, both in and out of it's armored pepper-pot; Davros, the creator of the Daleks; and someone who has just be exterminated by the Daleks (lower right corner)
Pixie loves “Doctor Who,” so I'm sure you'll be seeing a lot more of her artwork here. Thank you, Pixie, for helping out your mother in her time of need.
I'm going to bed now, folks. I am having an allergic reaction to something and I just took a dose of Benedryl, so I expect I will be out until well into tomorrow morning.
Click on the image above to see it bigger!
The Hubster and the children inform me that I have drawn Uncle Paco perfectly. Paco is one of Hubster’s 4 brothers. His son, Jaleo, graduates from college this year. No kidding, that freakishly tall kid was an infant in poopie diapers at my wedding. And now he’s finishing college and already got a job lined up at computer software company. I feel old just thinking about it.
With regards to Hubster and his brothers… Hubster is the oldest of 5, Paco is the second child, and then there is Patrick, Carlos, and Chris, in that order. Chris has been in the webcomic once before. His son is Evenrood. Gabe is Patrick’s son. All 5 of the brothers are “saints,” thus the halos. They became “saints” when they were very young. Hubster’s parents traveled often to Puerto Rico, where my mother-in-law is from, and there was an artist in San Juan who painted plaques of saints. The first year they met him, he painted plaques of my father-in-law, mother-in-law, and the Hubster all as saints. The next year, when they had another baby (Paco), the same artist painted a saint portrait of him. And the year after that, he painted one of Patrick. The artist disappeared after that, but when Patrick was older, he painted saint portraits of the youngest two brothers, Carlos and Chris. And their saint names are…
And this is why when I draw the Hubster or any of his brothers, they all have halos. So now you know!
By the way, this webcomic was actually all done and ready to be posted yesterday afternoon. Then I discovered something very annoying about Manga Studio 5 and Photoshop.
Do you see the plaid pattern on Paco’s shirt? That’s a Manga Studio material/screen tone. It was originally yellow, but I wanted to make it a shabby sort of blue, so I check the option in the materials panel to make the plaid material a black and white screen tone instead of its original yellow color. I then set the blending mode for the material layer to “color burn” and painted a medium blue color on a layer underneath that. The result was the exact shade of blue plaid that I wanted for Paco’s shirt. Hurrah!
(If none of the above made any sense to you, don’t worry. I’m just being a huge graphics geek here. The basic gist of this is, I wanted to make a yellow pattern blue, and that was how I did it.)
Then I went to export the image as a flattened PNG. That’s the file format I use for all the comics. But for some reason, the exported flattened image lost the blue plaid on the shirt and left me with a gray-scale plaid instead!
“Okay,” I said to myself. “Maybe Manga Studio has a problem with flattening layers with blending modes. I’ll just export this sucker as a layered Photoshop file instead and do the flattening in that program!”
And I did that, and when I pulled up the layered file in Photoshop, I saw that I had all my layers but that the plaid material layer had been set to “normal” as the blend mode so it still showed up as gray-scale instead of faded blue.
Well, that was no big deal. I reset the plaid material layer to “color burn,” got back that lovely faded blue, and flattened all the layers in Photoshop…
And promptly got the same gray-scale plaid material again.
I then spent hours researching what the problem could be. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get Photoshop or Manga Studio to keep the blending mode of the plaid material set to “color burn.” The moment I flattened the image, I kept getting the gray-scale, “normal” blend mode instead.
How could this be?! I’ve been working with Photoshop for 5 years or so now. I know I’ve flattened images with blending layers before, and not had ANY problems! In fact, just about every image I’ve ever created with Photoshop used various blending modes and I don’t recall having any problems with any of those images! So why was I having problems with this image now?
After hours of searching the web, I ran across a comment that pointed me in the right direction. It was a short comment, buried deep in the responses to a graphics forum post from someone who had had similar problems to me a few years before. The comment mentioned how someone at Adobe had really screwed up when the wrote the code for the “color burn” blend mode.
And that’s when I realized that I had never used the “color burn” blend mode in an image before. I know I’d tried it while working on some images, but the result was never something I liked and so I switched to another blending mode instead, like “overlay” or “soft light.” So I opened up the layered comic in Photoshop again and this time set the blending mode for the plaid material to “soft light,” and then flattened the entire image. And it worked just fine. “Soft light” works a bit differently than “color burn” so I got a different shade of blue, one not so perfectly faded. But hell, it worked!
So that was the problem. The “color burn” blending mode in Photoshop (and apparently Manga Studio as well) is pretty much all screwed up, at least in CS3. It was such a tiny little thing in the end, and it took me only 5 hours to figure it out!
You live and learn. Painfully, most of the time, but still, you learn.
Enjoy the webcomic. I’m getting started on the next one tonight!
Dear readers of my mom's website,
My mom has decided to put some of my artwork on her website today. My mom's webcomic will be up tomorrow. We decided to play a game last night, so it's going to take her a little longer to do her comic.
Until then, here is my drawing. It is a picture of Smaug the Great and Powerful from “The Hobbit – The Desolation of Smaug.” Bilbo Baggins is running from Smaug. Smaug is breathing fire. He's chasing Bilbo.
From Pixie
Smaug the Great and Powerful by Pixie, age 7
No webcomic today! Although I promise you there will be some fun cartoon art later down in this post.
But first, let me 'splain…
Over the past few months, I've been having increasing problems with joint pain. It actually started years ago, after I gave birth to the Princess and then had two knee injuries in a row. My knees hurt for months, but eventually the pain faded away to the occasional twinge when I went up and down the stairs. After Pixie was born, my knees began causing me so much trouble, I ended up going to a physical therapist for a couple months to strengthen them and reduce the pain. That seemed to help, and again, the pain faded away to the occasional twinge when heading up or down the stairs.
But the knee pain kept coming back, off and on throughout the years. I realized certain types of exercise – yoga, biking, swimming, water aerobics, and Wii Fit – seemed to keep the pain at bay. Other exercises – high impact stuff like running and karate – seemed to make it worse. I eventually gave up running in favor of water aerobics. As for karate, I started learning how to do things with as little impact on my knees as I could achieve (no more deep knee bends for this karate woman!). I figured it was osteo-arthritis, and it was only natural for a woman approaching her mid-forties to feel aches and pains in her knees from time to time.
Of course, there was also the occasional time when I'd come down with what I thought was the flu and I'd wind up stuck in bed for a day or so. Only I didn't have a fever… Or any congestion… Or any nausea… Or any other symptoms except aches and pains in my joints that put me under the covers with the heating pad for a while.
All of this was okay, though. The knee pain slowed me down a little, the flu-like days were a minor pain but nothing more, and none of it was enough to interfere with my daily life. Then last November I tore my meniscus and ACL in my right leg, and it was all downhill from there.
Let me say up front that I had a very successful reconstructive surgery and that my physical therapy, while it lasted months, did miracles for me. By the time March came around, I no longer limped and I could walk, swim, bike and hop on the elliptical with no pain. But during the months from January to March, I had a couple more instances of those flu-like days. When I went to see my orthapaedist, I told him it felt like I had sick knees; they felt feverish and achy and kept me in bed. The orthapaedist had no idea what it could be, since my knees seemed to be working just fine. He suggested I talk to a specialist, and I said I'd look into it.
I decided to start with a physical first. It had to be scheduled months in advance. The earliest date I could get was in November. Since I was back to normal activity, mostly, and had started easing back into karate classes, I wasn't in any hurry and I figured that was okay. Once the summer started, with all that warm weather, my knee problems mostly seemed to disappear. I was still recovering from the torn ACL, so it seemed natural to me to have problems getting up and down the stairs at the end of a long day. I was in the pool and on the bike with the kids everyday, too, so I expected to be tired. The girls learned to come downstairs to kiss me good night before they went to bed, so I wouldn't have to haul myself upstairs with my tired, aching knees.
And so it went, right through to September. Then sometime in that month, the back ache started. I developed this persistant pain in my lower back that dogged me all day and night. At first, I thought it was because our mattress was overdue to be flipped, so Hubster and I flipped it, but that didn't help. Then I thought the problem might be with our couch. I spend a lot of time there when I draw and crochet, and our couch is over 20 years old. I got some firm pillows to put against my back and made certain to sit with good posture, but that didn't help either.
The knee pain kicked in as well. And then the hip pain. And then the foot pain. That last was especially bad in the morning. In October, when my parents came to visit, I got the shock of my life when I got up early one morning and I met my mother in the hallway. We were both shuffling along with that same, painful, arthritic gate. Only my mom is in her late seventies and I still haven't hit 45 yet.
By that point, I was trying everything I could to get the joint pain under control. I ate gin-soaked raisins and took supplements of tumeric and fish oil and vitamin D. I swallowed huge capsules of OTC pain-relievers. I slept with my heating pad and took plenty of hot baths. I did yoga until I could bend myself completely in half without breaking a sweat. None of it worked.
Finally, November hit and I went in for my physical. I told the doctor everything. She ordered lots of blood tests and prescribed Gabapentin, which is an anti-seizure medication that also works with rheumatoid arthritis pain. I spent a week waking up completely loopy because of the medication I took the night before. When the blood test results came back, everything was normal.
So the doctor forwarded me to a specialist, who I will see in January. In the meantime I am doing everything I can to manage my symptoms. Some days I am so pain-free, I feel 15 years younger. Other days I am back in bed with the heating pad by 6PM. I've learned to pre-set my bed before I head out to pick up the kids from school in the afternoons. I gather up everything I know I'm going to need in the evening – paperwork, iPad, Surface tablet, crochet project, whatever I need to work on – and I lay it out on one side of the bed, along with a comfortable set of sweats or PJs. My work hours have been drastically reduced to 1-2 hours in the day and another 1-2 hours in the evening. I've learned to take advantage of the morning hours, when I have the most energy, for things like exercise and Girl Scouts paperwork (which is probably the most exhausting task I have to face on any given day). I try to save the evenings for drawing and crochet, activities that I can pick up and put down as needed whenever the girls need my help with their homework.
Because of the drain on my work hours, I've also found myself having to make decisions everyday about what I'm going to work on. Last week, I finally emailed the staff at our Girl Scout service unit and told them i needed to step down from the Volunteer Support Team and any committees I was on due to health issues. This weekend, I had to choose between taking a karate test for 4th degree black belt and cleaning the house (no way in hell were both of those tasks going to get done!). And I also had to choose between drawing today's webcomic and drawing a new Christmas card design, something I've been trying to get to for weeks now.
It's probably too late for this card to be done in time for anyone to buy it for is Christmas. I still have several hours of work left to do on it. BUT it will be done in time for any after-Christmas sales that Zazzle may do, so if you're the kind who likes to buy your Christmas cards on sale a year in advance, this one is for you.
(And this is the part where I show you that fun artwork I promised at the beginning of this very long post.)
Ta-DAA!
I'll do a big reveal on the final artwork once it's done and posted to Zazzle, but for right now, the point I really want to get across is this…
I am doing everything I can to draw as fast as I can to keep the webcomics coming. But there are other projects that I need to work on as well. I have a TON of evil greeting cards that I want to draw, and I have promised both my girls that I will illustrate two stories they've written (that's one story per child!) and get those stories epublished somewhere. If for some reason, I don't get the ACW webcomic up on time every Monday, I will at least post something that I'm working on, be it artwork from a greeting card or calendar or an illustration from one of the kids' stories. And you may see more single panel webcomics from me. Honestly, there are plenty of events that happen around me that would make perfect single panel cartoons, and I may even turn some of those into greeting cards as well, if they work out that way.
So what I'm saying is be patient with me. I'm going to see a doctor, and in the mean time I will keep plugging away as best I can. I will even eventually finish setting up the Etsy shop I started working on last month. It will all happen, slowly, over time.
I promise!
Yes!! This is my life right now! Only my life is also neck-deep in Girl Scout stuff too, so this was the only way for me to get a comic done for today! Speed painting rules!!
You can see the video of the painting in progress here:
Enjoy!
So I decided to post my current works in progress on Fridays. This year I'm doing a series of robot drawings, one for each month. The eventual goal is to publish a calendar for next year. This is the robot for either March or April. I'm adding another broken egg-bot at the bottom of the page. With cookie sales wrapping up in the next week, we'll have to see how far I get by Friday.
My Zombie Calendar is finally for sale on Zazzle!!!
Well, file this under “better late than never!” Last year I started working on a zombie calendar, drawing a zombie a month using Adobe® Ideas on my iPad. I had planned to finish up the calendar and put it up for sale on Zazzle in November, but then I tore my ACL and all the plans I had for the rest of the year sort of fell apart. Honestly, I couldn’t sit upright with a laptop until just last week, due to the swelling and soreness in my right knee.
But now it’s done! Twelve zombies to commemorate the twelve months of the year! I will be ordering a couple of copies, hopefully to get them in time to take to Marscon on the 18th through the 20th in Williamsburg, VA. I will also have a collection of greeting cards, including Zombie Santa and a zombie Valentine, and some original crocheted amigurumi! If you’ve been following me on Twitter (@Cynical_Woman), you’ve seen some of the amigurumis in progress. I’ll have Skully Girl, Funky Chicken, Pumpkin Head, Zombie Sock Monkey, and Mr. Squishy, either in the art show or for sale at my table. So be sure to stop by and take a look!
(By the way, if you’re on Ravelry, I’m listed as CynicalWoman!)
Click on the thumbnail to see the full-sized webcomic!
Yes, this actually happened. No, I did not kill the small child. And yes, I am counting this as 4 points for PerCaDraMo because I have a bum knee and it's slowing everything down!!! So there!
I have no idea how Pixie managed to spill that much water out of the tub, but when I went screaming upstaris, there was more bath water on the floor than in the tub. In fact, there was almost more bath water in my yarn than in the tub. Almost, but fortunately I was able to move very fast in spite of my screwed-up knee. Frighteningly fast.
Speaking of my knee, I found out on Friday that I tore both the meniscus cartilage and the ACL in my right knee. So I will be having surgery in two weeks and then I will be on crutches probably for… Weeks? I dunno.
But before the surgery, I'm going to get up into the office and scan in plenty of Rats! comics as well as plenty of art for the Very Scary Art website so I can get back to posting on a regular basis.
Anyway, that's what's going on around here.
Hey! I know I missed yesterday's PerCaDraMo. This drawing was in progress but it wasn't quite ready, and I needed to get some sleep so I finished it today.
Anyway, here is Foxy Moxy. I drew her in Adobe Ideas on my iPad. The idea was to create a cute little fox with a lot of personality and I think I succeeded. I have ideas for this character, so that indicates success to me anyway.
I'm hoping to be back to the regular blogging schedule next week, meaning Rats! will return along with something for Friday. I may go back to Flashback Friday, or I may do something new. I'm toying with the idea of turning Fridays into a new art day, and showing off a new sketch or craft item each Friday. We'll see.
Anyway, this is Foxy Moxy!
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