I was going to draw this last week and actually post it on time but I ended up running into massive self-inflicted technical difficulties! Suffice to say I fried my laptop’s brains and my PC went on strike when I accidentally overloaded its memory… which resulted in me not being able to save anything…
But we’re back! And happy to be so! And isn’t Glen frigging adorbs investigating bad puns? I thought so.
The Making of Glen
I could of spent a lot longer doing this comic in a more anal-retentive manner but I’m sort of in between doing 300 other things so I did this whole comic quick and dirty. I had no idea herons were such an easy shape to draw! Who knew!
I know, I know, all this past week there have been memes flooding the internets with adorable horned alligators. You’re probably already sick of them but you know what? Glen loves himself a good trickster god so I had to run with it. Now we get to sit back and see how long it takes before Disney sues us. *innocently whistles*
The Making of Glen
So for the past week I have been watching all sorts of tattooing videos hoping to learn enough to become a proper artist and maybe do some sort of creative endeavor that actually pays some bills. It’s interesting because it’s a completely different art form from comic design but weirdly I can still apply some of the lessons I have learned from both. For a while now I haven’t really enjoyed drawing Glen as much as I used to because I always felt I could make it somehow better – more realistic looking. And although I still want to achieve realism I realize now that I should do so when doing other projects. The beautiful thing about comics is they’re simple – they get to the point with the least amount of details possible and that’s good! So today when I drew the squirrel I didn’t give his tail individual hairs, nor did I give anyone fingers and toes on their paws because I realized I didn’t have to and it wasn’t adding anything to the piece. So for now laziness wins!
I’m not going to lie, this past week has been brutal. I am emotionally and physically completely spent and my life is weaving so wildly out of control I am not sure I will be able to catch myself this time. So I have had to look really deeply into myself and remember what makes this life worth fighting for and as stupid as it sounds Glen the Caterpillar is one of those things. He makes me happy when no one else can put a smile on my face and today he encouraged me not to give up with a shitty Rocky styled 1980’s sports montage. Bless his little rubbery blue heart.
The Making of Glen
I wasn’t sure how to compose this comic. I had a few ideas in my head but I didn’t really know how to show the full set of actions in one panel. I think I did alright… I cut a lot of corners and did a lot of things terribly old school because I just don’t have it in me today to let my Type A personality take over but I don’t think it made it any worse for wear. I got the point across and Glen is as adorable as ever.
You know when you’re just sitting there minding your own business, chilling to some documentaries and then something so outrageous pops up you can’t stop laughing? That’s totally what happened when I learned about Sheepsquach and obviously I had to figure out how such a monster could be… and Glen had the answer!
The Making of Glen
I’m having one of those mornings where everything I touch falls to pieces which is why this comic isn’t as good as it could be. I LOVE the texture of Sheepsquach’s hair but the brush I was using to make it disappeared just as I was about to draw an arm for him?! Just gone. No idea what happened to it but I am super sad because it looked so good! Clearly I still need help drawing Bigfoot’s face because no matter how many times I attempt it he just looks… weird. SIGH. Maybe next week I will do better. I am surprised I was even able to draw a Glen this week after taking last week off due to an IMMENSE amount of stress going on in my life right now.
So I may have been wandering around BritBox like a lost lamb when I found something called Upstart Crow – which is apparently a very British comedy about Shakespeare’s life and it had me in stitches with it’s creative reinterpretations of the classics. This got me to wondering what Shakespeare would mean to a cheerfully stoned caterpillar. And this is what I came up with. I might be biased but I think putting Glen in a fur coat is always a great thing to do. I JUST WANT TO HUG HIM! But I’ll resist.
The Making of Glen
I made Glen SUPER late this week. It’s past 5PM on Monday and I just finished it. SIIIIGH. That being said I took the background from Glen Visit’s Popple’s Dungeon and updated it with some blurring effects to make it look less distractingly cartoonish. From there I played with brush strokes to find which one resembled fluffy fuzzy wuzzy bee hair. And then I drew a skull on the bee as Hamlet demands I do. It’s style is reminiscent of the death’s heads I find on the slate gravestones that I admire so much. It’s crude, at best, I know, but it works!
The past week has been total chaos so I had to get inspiration for Glen from a dream – a dream I had after about 48 hours worth of dreams trying to sleep off a migraine. It makes little sense and doesn’t have any context but damn if it isn’t adorable! To pirate Glen!!
The Making of Glen
Today I played with some new textures trying to get the teddy bear right… I don’t think I am done fiddling with this but I am getting closer so that’s all that counts.
Life’s been pretty chaotic lately. I spent nearly a month fighting with my travel blog Catching Marbles which was displaying the dreaded White Screen of Death so I was a bit preoccupied to do too much with Glen. But I love Glen. And after watching the new Start Trek cartoon I couldn’t help but join in on the amicable spoofery. (Also why is my spell check accepting spoofery as a word? That cannot be right.)
The Making of Glen
This week’s comic was the first time I tried to incorporate a real place that I’ve actually been to – the Valley of the Gods. Now, if you don’t know what the Valley of the Gods is I’ll tell you. It’s this absolutely stunning spot out in the middle of the desert that just about every Western you’ve ever seen and a great deal of the original Star Trek was filmed. I’m not sure if they were specifically at Valley of the Gods or just somewhere really close – either way look at all that orange sand! HOW ALIEN!
Also going to note it was weirdly hard to draw the little Star Trek insignia AND I discovered it’s gone through several changes over the years but was basically a spiraling squiggle back in the day…
Oh, it feels so good to be back after this unanticipated two week hiatus! I apologize for our conspicuous absence – it was a combination of technical difficulties and illness but we’re back on track now! And we’re tipping our hats to all you wonderful sci-fi geeks out there. You know we love you!
The Making of Glen
As with everything lately this comic started out as something completely different – a joke about space grasshoppers – but do you know how hard space grasshoppers are to draw?! I THOUGHT mechanical space spiders might be easier but whew… I’m not so sure now! Even so I had fun with this one and with the additional jokes coming from the mouths of the spiders themselves. The sci-fi genre should be careful or these little buggars might unionize and demand at least one series show them in a positive light!
I decided to do another homage to one of my all time favorites – the original Twilight Zone and it’s insanely iconic It’s a Good Life episode where one little boy gets to wish people away for not thinking happy thoughts. Where do they go? The cornfields! I know the sting of this no longer reaches most people because most people no longer have first hand experiences with cornfields but here’s why that’s so scary- because they’re extremely disorienting. It’s just rows and rows of corn with no way out. It’s a terrifying thought, probably first implemented in old German fairy tales where magic umbrellas would fly bad little boys and girls away to the proverbial cornfield. (Doesn’t that put a whole new light on Mary Poppins!)
Still – in this classic horror scenario Glen always manages to find a way to make it adorable. And I couldn’t be more proud.
The Making of Glen
I was actually lacking in inspiration this week when this idea popped into my head yesterday. I had spent all day fighting with technology on a different matter so by the time I was ready to sit down and illustrate it I was already on the punchy side which is not a great place to start with such a complex illustration. I had to look up cornstalks in an attempt to draw them. I drew one and copied it many times over to make a field and I applied the same process to the pile of corn which I moved the corn into different angles in order to make them look like a more convincing pile. I think it came out well! And I am proud of myself for once again pushing the boundaries of what I could do – going so far as to find an appropriate brush stroke for the top of the corn stalks to make them look loaded with pollen.
Initially I drew the image in color. I thought turning it into a black and white image would be as simple as applying a filter like you do with photos. HAHAHAHA. No, when I looked up how to do this in Clip Studio Paint I got a bunch of grotesquely long multi-step tutorials which I looked at with glassy eyes before cheating. I totally uploaded the illustration to LunaPic (dot com) and applied the black and white filter. Took all of two steps and 15 seconds from upload to black and white. I regret nothing (fully realizing that if I were to be professional about this I’d totally learn the correct way which probably allows me to do this without compressing the image. Whatever, I’m not making this into a billboard so it doesn’t matter.)
Last week I had a screaming migraine which resulted in me staying home instead of spending time with my muse. I fear this week’s Glen comic has suffered from this lack of creative inspiration. With that being said this is a shout out to everyone out there who has a pet that thinks it’s hilarious to sleep with their eyes open in the most death-like position they can muster.
The Making of Glen
Despite the migraine I have managed to accomplish a lot as an artist in the past couple weeks and this is starting to drift into my Glen comics. For instance I have discovered brush strokes – which is what I used to make the background.
In other news I am excited to share the fact I am studying tattooing in the hopes of maybe finding an employable use for my various artistic skills. God knows Glen isn’t breaking the bank with his little shop. Despite blasting his adorable face all over FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for almost two years he is almost up to one visitor a day on this website. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
And so I have started playing with creating tattoo designs and stabbing them into leather. Even better yet I got this awesome little transfer copier and look! Here are some of my designs ready to apply in mere seconds!!
