To be fair, baby suits are super cute.
Funny Jokes: Foster Dog Pile Up
Used that brake a lot.
Daily Dog Cartoons: A Little Help From Your Friends
Somedays you just need a little boost.
Free Funny - Needy Monsters
Beginning to wonder if this was a metaphor for some of my foster dogs. Haven't had any that have wreaked this much destruction, but a few have come close. A lot of these quick toons sprout from common sayings that I catch myself and others repeated consistently. Then my imagination takes it to the extreme, or more accurately, the dark extreme. It's not a technique I consciously farm, but maybe I should.
On that note, I'm going to have more live-streams coming up. Currently getting familiar with OBS, Open Broadcasting Software. The plan is to live-stream drawing comic strips, children's book illustrations and single panel cartoons. So while I figure out the difference between "scenes" and "sources" in O.B.S., I'm also putting together lesson outlines and ideas.
If there's a particular concept or process or technique you'd like to see live-streamed, let me know in the comments or drop me a line. Once I get more proficient at this live-streaming thing, I'll hack together a multi-cam deal so I can live draw in my notebook. Any advice in that arena is also welcome. I've always been a behind the scenes techy and never been much of a fan of being in front of the lens.
More Single Panel Silliness - Shank Monkey
For starters, Shank Monkey would make an awesome name for a band. This one began with a bunch of monkey doodles in which the monkeys performed all sorts of menial tasks such as grooming mustaches or applying make-up. And then boom, a little monkey showed up with a knife and shank monkey was born.
Before you ask, yes, there are t-shirts. I had to. Don’t know if they’ll sell or not, but shank monkey t-shirts needed to be a thing. You can get one by clicking here.
Onto the next! I’ll post another Primordial Syrup shortly. In the meantime, back to illustrating “The Conjurers, Book Two”.
Gardening with Sasquatch
I don’t do a lot of comics with monsters from central casting. Usually I make them up and they have a strong Lovecraft or Clive Barker flare (go figure). However, this idea, I thought, was too silly to pass up. I’m sure the next one will be a tad darker as that is the way it seems the universe balances out my sense of humor.
Also, there’s a new episode of “The Conjurers” webcomic up at gocomics. I’ll have another post about that, as one of the characters featured in the comic ended up saving the third novel. More on that later. In the meantime, I’m in the super early stages of stitching together a promotional tour for book one of the Conjurers. Haven’t had any official meetings with my publisher on that yet, but if you know of any schools or libraries that might want to have me visit, drop me a line.
Nightmare Car Repairs
I’ll probably repeat this several times, but these strips are ideas that strike me as funny at the time I doodle them. Doesn’t guarantee they’ll make sense. This is one of my favorites. The initial sketch was the clown poking out of the engine. Weeks later the mechanic labeling the problem as gasket clowns made me laugh. And there you go.
I liked how the final art turned out. You have to draw lots of comics before the style fins itself. I think I’m getting closer. I want them to be sem-realistic an not too cartoonish. Pretty good balance in this comic. The realism seems to heighten the dark weirdness and the humor at the same time. I’ll keep pushing and tweaking the style bit by bit and see where it goes.
In other news, my other comic, “The Conjurers”, which is a companion piece to the novels will be returning this Halloween! That too is an experiment and so far, I’ve enjoyed where the story has gone. Never been happy wit the art. Then again, I limited myself to one hour for pencils, inks and colors. Didn’t have the time while writing the books. More on that in my next post. Till then, leave a comment or drop me a line and let me know what you think of “Primordial Syrup” so far.
Single Panel Cartoons
Where the weird things are. I’ve always done single panel comics. The earliest ones I remember were in fourth grade. It was always the best way to get the weird images in my head out. They also made me infamous in high school. First time I got called to the headmaster’s office was over a single panel comic.
The comic, like most of my single panels, was only a fleeting, strange thought. No deeper meaning, just something that struck me as funny. This comic featured an average tree-lined street in an average neighborhood. Except an enormous soap on a rope had smashed one car parked on the road.
Long story short, they called me to the headmaster’s office after the comic ran in the school paper. I spent half an hour reassuring him that there was no deep religious connotations implying that god had dropped his soap-on-a-rope.
Despite the momentary apprehension of a week’s worth of detention, I realized why I had always loved off-beat, bizarre comics. The sheer fun of seeing the hundreds of different interpretations over a bit of nonsense. With no effort of creating something that contained a profound statement or some worldly truth, it could inspire deeper thought unique to every reader.
So ya, Primordial Syrup is the ongoing stream of strange that runs through my brain. I have notebooks full of ideas. I plan on rendering them into reality once a week. Let me know what you think in the comments. I’m always interested in what people think they mean.
