Life Intruding on Hard Boiled SteamPunk Girls

Life and the Intrusion of its Stuff

I've been a little light on posts lately, and there's a reason for that. It's a good one. Give me a minute. 

Oh that's right, mostly it has to do with trying to burn the candle at both ends. If you've been reading this blog you know that I have a regular 9-5 gig. Lately, due to a combination of this and that (I won't go into specifics here) things have been more demanding, which means more working late, which throws off my schedule for the evening, and I'm ultimately pretty tired by the time I can actually sit at my computer and try to spin gold from the rough straw of a blank page. 

Family life is something else altogether. The time I get with my wife and my daughter is the most rewarding thing in my life right now, but it has its own demands. Anyone who has ever had a toddler will understand. 

Then there's wrestling with the recurring existential dilemmas, but that may be a topic for a different post.

Doodles: Hard boiled SteamPunk Marker Edition

Life stuff and the wall of thorns it has thrown up in my path notwithstanding, I have not been idle. In a previous post I mentioned that I was learning to work with some professional art markers I'd ordered. Here you can see some of the fruit of those labors. 

The SteamPunk character was drawn from a photo reference I found in a quick Google Image search...and will probably never be able to find again. It's a good thing I downloaded the original. The second image is my own, but I used an image from the Rockstar Games video game "L.A. Noir" to help with some of the details. It helps to make it feel authentic. You just can't pull a fedora out of your butt and...wait...that sounded weird. 

I really like the way the markers feel and the depth they add to my drawing. Since I started working with them I can't believe I didn't start buying sets here and there much earlier. 

With the same markers I did a couple of drawings for people at work. One was the "Awesome Possum" because I overheard one of the ladies I work with say that a couple of times to people she had on the phone. I thought it was hilarious so I drew a hip possum in sunglasses. The other was a kind of manga-styled-self-portrait of me making a "happy food face" for another of the ladies at work who brought in homemade mini-cupcakes for the office. 

Unfortunately I gave both of the ladies the original work and didn't get a chance to scan either one. The cupcake face I'll probably be doing again. One of my coworkers suggested putting it on a t-shirt. I've been thinking about it and it occurred to me, "why the hell not?" The same co-worker said I should be putting more of my art in a blog. He was right about that, so I should give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to putting some of my drawings on apparel. 

Geek Speaking New Toys

Geek Speak: There are worse things...

Having made a connection with a human who quite literally understands them, I think any animal would go to extremes to resist being dragged back into the usual circumstances where that level of understanding is missing. It's certainly that way in this case, but then she's probably going to make Wuffles try on the slightly used tutu she just got off "the eBay."

New Toys for Artist Boys
Yesterday there was a package in the mail for me from Cheap Joe's Art Supplies. This was something I'd been looking forward to getting for several days. Over every lunch break for the last week and a half I've been checking the tracking page, eagerly following my package (I know how that sounds, moving on). Yesterday it happened to arrive while I was on my lunch break. After it arrived I eagerly opened my package knowing I didn't have time to play with it on my lunch break (...moving on...). The contents of the eagerly anticipated envelope revealed themselves to be ten brand new, high quality art markers from Prismacolor.

On my most recent paycheck I set aside some money so that I could order the markers from Cheap Joe's. The markers I ordered are a gradient from black to light gray, in cool and warm tones. I started out with gray markers because most of the work I do is in black and white, and I needed a way to put down smooth, even, layered "colors" that would look good even after they're scanned. Although I enjoy working with pencil, and I'm happy with the results overall, I don't feel like the artwork in my strips is as "clean" as it could be.

It'll probably take some trial and error to get to where I like the look I'm getting before I start making heavy use of them in Geek Speak, but I like the results I'm getting the little that I've been able to play with them. It's definitely going to change the feel of the comic, but I think it'll be for the better.

On another note, Cheap Joe's Art Supplies lives up to its name. Prismacolor is a premium brand, and their line of professional art markers is especially expensive. The price for the set on Cheap Joe's was much less that I could get from Amazon or anywhere else. Two sets of markers were only slightly more than one set if ordered from Amazon. Both sites offer free shipping.

I quickly learned the only downside of ordering from Cheap Joe's and using the free shipping option is that it takes a long time. That's really a relative term. While I was growing up it was considered really fast if you could order something and have it arrive in a week. Now people get bent out of shape if an online merchant's standard 3-5 day shipping isn't offered for free. That said, it took eight days for the markers to arrive. It doesn't make much sense to pay the extra fees for expedited shipping (they have options for 3-5 day, 2 day, and overnight). After shipping costs I could probably get the same thing from Amazon, for about the same price, and not pay shipping if it falls under Amazon Prime.

I like the prices on Cheap Joe's but I can only recommend it if you're ordering something you don't need right away and you don't mind waiting to get it.