Theophanes Avery is a hapless wanderer, avid writer, artist, adventurer, joyfully androgynous being, and all around lover of life. They are the author of their debut book Honoring Echo as well as the writer of numerous blogs on many subjects.
It’s Wednesday AND Christmas! So I would like to wish everyone a heartfelt Merry Christmas and/or happy holidays to all the lovely people out there still enjoying Glen’s antics. I couldn’t continue bringing joy and laughter without all your love and support.
Yours humbly,
Theophanes Avery
I know I should be drawing Christmasy comics this month but it just doesn’t feel like Christmas this year. Is it the bizarre weather which is throwing intermittent snow storms in between freakish heat waves? Maybe. It feels like April! But I digress. I can’t exactly take Mother Nature’s keys even though I know she’s tanked. SIGH.
ANYWAY, enough about the weather. This week’s comic is simple, punderful, and I think a bit endearing. I enjoyed drawing it even though I really didn’t have the time to put into it. Maybe next week will be better!
I feel like I haven’t learned much in the past few comics… still… I devised my own method of making feathers (basically drawing an oblong blob and using the finger blur to push the veins of each outwards.) And I used the same feather resized, given different colors, and rotated, throughout the whole comic.
Meanwhile I did not get stuck on making the snake look realistic. For some reason I didn’t mind it being a full on green cartoon snake that doesn’t even look remotely like a boa constrictor. Brains are funny things.
I am still struggling to find a consistent “voice” for these comics. There’s not much that links them – not the subject matter, not their complexity, sometimes not even the way they are drawn! It literally is just pasting a little blue caterpillar in whatever situation my mind sees fit. As far as gaining a wider audience to enjoy him this is a bit like gambling… but who knows. 2020 is looking promising – perhaps it’ll be Glen’s year.
This week’s comic illustrates what happens when you mix Lord of the Flies with baby caterpillars and a holiday stool pigeon… Does anyone else find that damn elf as creepy as I do?! This was a weirdly cathartic strip this week.
This week has been rough. I’m dealing with some things in my personal life that have left me drained of energy, creative juices, and time. As such I needed something super simple to draw and well…. how did it get so complicated?!
I ended up tracing a photo of Elf on a Shelf and then deleting the photo layer and then repeating that with a chair that was tilted at just the right angle. Resize so both fit. Add caterpillars. And lights, and a halo around those lights with a soft wash… and there we have it!
I’m actually happy with this. More so than I thought I would be!
We all know that guy…. the Bit Coin guy… you know him, I know him, he’s ubiquitous. And as he blathers on and on about how cool Bit Coins are the rest of us look up with glassy eyes and go, “That’s great Joe, real great. I need to go eat lunch now.” And our profound disinterest is likely partway because virtually none of us actually know what bit coins are… although we may have some vague ideas from the colorful language around them. For instance bit coins are “mined.”
And so I sent Glen off to the mines – to mine bit coins… although by the looks of it they started out as regular chocolate coins before being bitten. Such is life with a hungry hungry caterpillar and a comic artist who likes to take things literally.
I knew I’d have a hellishly busy week so I drew this Glen on Saturday to put up on Wednesday. I was all proud of myself for being ahead of the game. Too bad my computer wasn’t so keen. I have never had this many problems drawing a comic! For some reason it wasn’t allowing me to copy more than one layer at a time which made duplicating the trolley (and it’s wheel on a second layer) a total pain but I did eventually manage!
This comic was a very basic one. Initially I was just going to draw Glen eating a coin but why would he be eating coins? He’s not actually a toddler though he sort of looks like it – and then I thought, “Because they’re chocolate. DUH.” But just one frame – a head shot of him gnawing on a single coin seemed… too plain. So I decided he should be mining these coins and just for effect I should add the Depressed Teddy somewhere doing his usual depressing thing. This time I figured he should be reaching longingly for a lit stick of dynamite in a moment of intense anticipation not dissimilar to the comics in The Book of Bunny Suicides. And the expression on his face remindes me of yet another suicidal teddy bear – the one on Supernatural…
Anyway… dark humor aside this comic was nice in it taught me patience as well as how to make a complex idea in a simple way – something I think may help Glen in the future.
Well, it’s the day before Thanksgiving – otherwise known as America’s most passive-aggressive holiday and I thought I would draw a comic to reflect our ever conflicted sentiments on this event. On one hand Thanksgiving is kind of sweet – it’s a gathering of family and friends to eat a big delicious meal and give thanks to the indigenous people’s of North America for saving our asses and feeding us when we ended up on a strange new continent totally fucking unprepared. On the other hand it’s also the holiday we have to eat a whole meal with our most racist relatives and celebrate the near total genocide of aforementioned indigenous peoples…. SIGH. This is why we can’t have nice things.
To lighten the mood a bit I have decided to look at the ridiculous side of Thanksgiving – a historical narrative of pure lunacy – heavily influenced by Eddie Izzard’s “tiny flags” routine which has aged well over the years, I have to say.
This might sound insane but I have been so on top of things this week I actually drew this entire comic on Saturday, not the two minutes before release as I have been doing. As such I was able to take an idea I had and really tool with it. Mostly this came in the form of drawing things, realizing my perspective was way off, and having to resize and move them which I can do with the help of layers. WOO LAYERS! So much better than having to get it all right the first time around like in the Olden Times of Microsoft Paint!
I don’t know how much time I spent doing this but it was longer than you’d expect… I was however super relaxed listening to music and watching people get tattooed on the TV behind me. I’m a multi-tasker. This is probably how the Depressed Teddy found his way into the scene once again creating a mock Harold and Maude-esque suicide in the background. I’ve had a few chats with friends about whether or not Depressed Teddy should have an actual name and whether or not this lack of a proper name is contributing to his bleak mood. Is he Maurice the Intensive Care Bear? Or perhaps a Steve the Failed Welbutrin PR Bear? Or something cutesey like Chuckles? I don’t know…
Hell, I don’t even know a lot about Glen himself. I thought he was the size of a caterpillar but sometimes he’s the size of a teddy bear. It took me until yesterday to realize he’s been eating the mushroom to achieve this – one side makes you smaller, one side makes you bigger. I have been asked how old he is in addition to this and I just… I have nooo idea. He has an old sounding name and an archaic background story so it seems likely he’s been around forever but who knows! Not me!
Recently I watched Interview with a Vampire in it’s entirety and it was hilarious. Don’t get me wrong – I have crazy mad respect for Anne Rice, she’s still the only author I have ever come across that can make me vomit with her words – and I mean this as a compliment not a criticism. I was reading William S Burrough’s in my mid-teens and the visceral descriptions of gangrenous heroin usage didn’t make me bat and eye but Anne Rice writing about her vampires feeding? That sent me flying to the bathroom twice. RESPECT.
Maybe that’s why I find the need to relentlessly make fun of vampires. I don’t know… but Glen is more than happy to indulge me in this. So here he is all floofy and fluffed burning shit down just like in the movie (and I presume book?)
Meanwhile we see Depressed Teddy in the background getting a little mixed up in it all for that adorably disturbing touch as if having a fire bug in the foreground wasn’t enough.
Of course while I drew this Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire was blaring through my head.
I don’t even know how long I spent on this week’s comic. I lost count of the hours. Apparently drawing fire with absolutely no experience or instruction is obscenely difficult. And conflicting because I want it to look real… but this is a comic and nothing else looks real sooo…. What is my problem? I DON’T KNOW.
Suffice to say I started out with this little attempt all on my own. It’s cute. And I think the idea of fire is pretty good here. It’s basically just a “for effect” pen in different colors. Not bad… but it does sort of also look like crate paper blowing on a fan…
Then I looked it up on YouTube and wow – were those tutorials shit. The first one told me to just do the same thing but add some blurring effects. Somehow it came out looking weirdly like a big smudgy pastel blob which was super disappointing at I spent about 300 unnecessary steps making it. Pushed all sorts of weird buttons…. Still don’t know what half of them were supposed to do.
And then I watched another tutorial – with no sound – which was fun. That one told me I should draw the flame free hand in vaguely squiggly blobs, overlay different lighter colors of vaguely squiggly blobs, and blur the crap out of it manually rather than with a filter as the first suggested. The first time I tried this it came out PERFECT. And then I wasn’t able to do it again…
Meanwhile I came across additional struggles when I decided to draw Depressed Teddy. I really want to add him to more comics doing a Harold and Maude sort of gag in the background – mocking scenes of suicide for attention… I hope people get the humor in this or at least the reference! Else it comes off as odd. That being said it’s not easy drawing a teddy bear and AGAIN I find myself wanting it to look more realistic…. Whhhhyyyy…. I don’t know. Maybe I am going somewhere with this drawing thing and it isn’t normal comics? God forbid I start drawing everything in 3D. Please send help.
I have a friend whose life goal is to start a glamping retreat. Apparently glamping is the new word for “glamour camping” – which is just a fancy way of saying, “Let’s go play in the woods WITH all the appropriate amenities. I’m not fighting bears for toilet paper, thanks.” However when she started to explain to me what glamping was I couldn’t get over the word which was firing off random synapses in my brain. I couldn’t separate it from Glam. So Glam Camping… And that’s when the gender fucked squirrel throwing glitter showed up in my head. YOU’RE WELCOME.
Sorry to the random person on Twitter who said there should be a unicorn. I spent two days drawing a squirrel – I think a horse might be beyond my abilities right now. And I am not sure what unicorns have to do with anything other than they tend to appear wherever glitter is…. Oh and I also would like to apologize to all the British and everyone who lived through the 70’s for this comic. I realize my idea of Glam is… vague at best. I could have looked it up but it’s the holiday season and I’m too busy to fall down that profound of a rabbit hole. Seems that might take a few weeks to crawl out of.
So waiting until the day before to draw a weekly comic is really not suggested especially when the only idea you can come up with is obscenely complicated. And yet here I am. Again.
First I had to figure out how to illustrate a glamping setting which was difficult because…. well they’re complicated. How do I show how fancy it is?! I tried drawing a yurt and well…. that was a colossal failure. Then I thought, “Maybe a treehouse would be fun” but then that didn’t fit in the panel right even though it allowed for the aforementioned glitter throwing squirrel to be riding a galloping unicorn through the scene. HMMMM.
I settled on something favored in the 1960’s – an A-frame cabin! WOO WOO! SUPER EASY to draw a triangle and add a hobbit door. Then to add the right mood – I drew a shitty little cafe table and added hearts, flowers, and fairy lights. Nailed it! But now where does the squirrel go?
Ah yes, let’s have him ricocheting of the table like a distracted cabaret dancer. Only how does one draw a squirrel? And make him glamorous? The feather boa was obvious. Everything else not so much. My first attempts at drawing a squirrel were so profoundly bad I deleted them to hide the evidence. Then I looked up squirrel clip art to see how others had managed to draw them… And I more or less copied their techniques. Only in brown he looked… boring. Clearly the only answer was to make him purple. I tried putting him in a derby as that seemed Britishy but that didn’t end well and I settled on a top hat instead – which was also Britishy. I then gave him a cape but then he looked like a magician and I decided less is more.
The glitter was surprisingly easy to create using the spray paint tool and fucking around with the brush size and density just like I did with the other effects (i.e. the grass, flowers, hearts. and stars.)
Then to add Glen being Glen…. for some reason this came out as him trying to lick glitter off his own head. I don’t know why but it works.
And the best part of all this? I accidentally learned a new button. Previously I was copying and pasting bits of comic onto new canvases manually. But then I accidentally hit “Create new from Clipboard” and bamb! I was in a new canvas, my image was pasted, and it was already the right size! Granted I forgot to copy each layer I needed but that was an easy fix. This is so going to streamline the process from here on out especially if I get into animating. *~*BOUNCE BOUNCE*~*
It’s the first week of November which means all the Halloween candy is likely gone and there’s a lot of rumbly tummies and regrets. Glen is no exception… here he is covered in chocolate and remorse.
This week I didn’t do too much different or special although it did take me a lot of time. I just found a photo of a pile of candy and and traced over it with a fresh layer eventually deleting the original photo as I resized the pile to suit my needs. Then I added a very fat little caterpillar and for that added kick I then threw more candy on top of him. He’s not feeling so good now…
Though this week’s comic does make me feel weirdly guilty like I am torturing a real entity and not just a doodle. I wonder if any other comic illustrators feel like that? I know writers sometimes do – because I’m also a writer (who for some terrifying reason is currently working on a children’s book because I need MORE self-taught illustrating skills!)
Today we get to play with puns and give a tip of the hat to all the tech geeks out there as Glen discovers the “dark web.” In his world this is just the web created by a certain black widow who is a call back to Glen Joins Tinder. What’s not answered is whether or not he knew what he was getting into when he went in there… or how he’ll get out… Best wishes there bud!
I have also decided to separate my descriptions of the panel each week with how I made them. I would love to show my progress as I evolve as an illustrator – something I think would bore most people to tears. So for everyone who likes learning about this sort of thing I will write these passages under part two of every entry The Creation of Glen – something all the people here who just want to see the comic can happily skip over.
Now keep in mind I have no formal training or education in animation, drawing, computer sciences, or literally anything else. What you see here on my website is the creations of an avid autodidact – that is I teach myself everything. Most people would take a course or at least watch a lot of YouTube tutorials but me… I prefer to blunder around pushing shiny buttons until something explodes. It’s an imprecise and sometimes terrifying way to learn things but it’s going to be reflected beautifully in this part of the blog so here goes nothing!
This weeks panel is a wonderful Frankenstein’s monster of layers and callbacks. When I initially started drawing Glen again just a few short months ago my only previous experience was drawing him in Classic Microsoft Paint where layers were just not a thing. I am shocked at the amount of things you can do with layers! In this week’s comic I took the background from Glen Stumbles Into Popples Dungeon, the web from Charlotte’s Dear John in Glen Stumbles into an Awkward Moment, and the black widow from Glen Joins Tinder for Bugs. It made what would have easily taken five or more hours detailing and reduced it to a smooth hour and a half while maintaining the same high quality.
I never intended to have so many call back characters. Some of them I knew would return but mostly I figured these would just be Glen doing his Glen things by himself like the old days. More surprising is Glen’s world gave clarity to his size. I never knew how big he was… in my mind he was either the size of a teddy bear or just was randomly whatever size I needed him to be in each scene. Well now that I have somewhat accidentally added so many other bugs I can say with certainty he’s the size of a particularly rotund tomato worm.
In addition to using layers from previous comics I also learned how to invert an image when I discovered I needed The Black Widow facing in the opposite direction than the one she was in the original comic and I learned how to draw a layer that you could see previous layers underneath by reducing the opacity of the Fill tool. I needed to do this to cast a light from Glen’s glorious head lamp. And of course upon doing that I blurred the lines of the light to make it look more like real light and less like a crudely drawn cartoon.
I cannot believe how much I have been able to learn just doodling a few comics and I have my hopes set for someday making them even better as my skills improve. Ultimately I may cross the threshold from illustrator to animator and that’s when I can really call for a personal toast.
Until then I will continue bringing you the best content I can,
With love,
Theo
With Halloween approaching I felt like Glen needed a nice costume. Delighted he told me he wanted to go as Zorro and the giant snail could go as his trusty steed Tornado but I guess the lines of communication got crossed because they both showed up as Zorro… SIGH.
This is really what happens when you combine a lack of inspiration, the advice of a muse, and a few flu-induced fever dreams. Suffice to say it’s been a rough week but Glen, as usual, made it worth it. I cannot tell you how happy I am with my progress as these panels get more and more complex complete with many layers of scenery, texture, and costuming. It’s SO NICE to be able to show the world just a sliver what’s going through my strange mind. Here’s hoping you find this week’s comic as adorable as I did. Signing out with love,
Theophanes Avery