I actually had fun with today’s Glen! It came out pretty nice! And I think it captured an idea well. Good job me!
The Making of Glen
Inspiration for today’s comic came in the form of my constantly wandering mind. Basically I read someone was watching The Secret Life of Bees and I couldn’t help but wonder what are bees keeping secret?! And then it occurred to me, their fuzzy black and yellow stripes are just coats!
Other than that I didn’t do anything crazy new in drawing this except I created a new layer to add watercolor painted wings that looked translucent. The rest was straight up Old School Drawing. I know, how does anyone do that anymore??
Well it’s May Day. This either means the day where old people reminisce about handing out baskets and kisses ooooooor it’s what you call when your plane is hurtling toward a rough and unexpected landing. Maybe there’s some middle ground here? Wonder if Glen could achieve this feat. Why yes, yes he can!
The Making of Glen
I was lacking in inspiration this week and came up with this idea only after procrastinating BADLY. I consulted my muse asking what would be a terrible thing to hug and they said a porcupine. Seriously?! Now I have to figure out how to draw a porcupine! Even though it’s an old idea I still think it came out cute.
I did a lot of new things with this comic… for one I drew a porcupine which I decided should look like an exploding fuzz ball. I used the fingertip blur tool to achieve this and learned the more violently you draw each line the farther it’ll go! I also enjoyed learning how to draw a snake entwined in a tree branch which is harder than it sounds. I was lazy with his scales though using the spray paint tool. And I was challenged in how to draw a face hugger and an amoeba… but I think I got it! Actually the longest time I spent on making this comic was drawing the bubble letters. I have been obsessed with bubble letters since grade school and always wanted to know how to draw them. I don’t feel as if I’m great at this yet but I’m getting there!
Well… since the entire nation has put itself in quarantine there’s really no way to escape the 24 hour news cycle about this new pandemic… which is what brought me to today’s comic with Glen and a secret admirer who happens to be a plague doctor… Hey, if I can’t ignore it I’ll make a little light of it!
The Making of Glen
Lately I have been so busy I haven’t had much time for Glen so he’s been very simplistic. Today I learned how to draw a rose (badly) and a plague doctor. I reused an old background. Now all that is left is to see how sensitive my readership is… will this offend or make people laugh. I do not know.
Another day and another stretch of a pun, what can I say? It was a weird week. In today’s panel we get to see Pirate Squirrel stealing the ultimate ride – Glen’s acorn carriage. And we get to see Depressed Teddy all tangled up in the reigns!
The Making of Glen
I have been SO focused on writing and editing lately I haven’t had much time for Glen BUT with that being said I did add a few new elements this week. The first was a muse… I was completely and utterly out of ideas so I started having a nonsense conversation with someone until something came of it. This is so much easier than coming up with a new panel every week on my own!!
Besides that the biggest challenge I had drawing today’s panel would be the position of the depressed teddy bear…. again he’s in an odd position as I have him flopped up-side-down on the seat of the carriage tangled in the reigns. It’s… interesting how a teddy bear can change my perspective of the physical world…
I also stopped myself from making this comic overly complicated as I was going to have the squirrel driving out from under a house made of nuts… but that seems like a whole ‘nother joke in and of itself so I will save it for later!
Hey hey! Welcome to Glen’s new release day, FRIDAY! This time I am keeping it Friday. It was total madness to change it to Wednesday and I apologize.
Anyway… I was low on inspiration this week so I decided to play with puns. I learned that the phrase, “mind your p’s and q’s” is a British saying and that historians and etymologists can’t agree on what p’s and q’s actually are… So I decided to answer that question once and for all. They’re peas and queues.
Bear with me American audience, I know “queue” is not a word we use often here (unless we work the phones somewhere) and bear with me English audience for I clearly am not British. Much love to everyone though!
The Making of Glen
This week’s comic was so obscenely simple it only took me a few minutes to draw so I have little to report on except for the fact I am learning comics can get their point across very smoothly if there’s no distractions. Simplicity. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
I admit it – I have been obsessed with my writing lately and not giving Glen the attention he needs. Also writing has been my entire world for a few weeks and it’s burrowed into my brain so deep that I was unable to come up with a plotline for this week’s comic that wasn’t writing related. So here we are! Making bad puns… about writing…
The Making of Glen
Today I decided to draw Glen Old School – in one layer! Using the same tools I would have in Classic Microsoft Paint. It was a fun jaunt down memory lane but only lasted until I had to put in speech bubbles and text which are automatically a new layer. And then I decided a plain solid colored background was boring so instead I put them on the beach. They like the beach. I think. I’m still struggling to get the right expression on these little buggars. Could use some help!
This week I was running low on inspiration for Glen until the idea of drawing him as The Hanging Man popped into my head. I thought it’d be super cute to have him all tangled up and discombobulated. And when I drew it I was so happy with how it came out I knew I had to do a full spread – of totally random cards. You see, I don’t know diddly about Tarot.
That being said I sure had fun with this one! Glen is typically adorable and I couldn’t resist drawing a flaming tower, I mean who could?! Was it an unfortunate accident involving a Frankenstein-like experiment that caused this inferno or was the suicidal teddy bear at it again?? I do not know.
Of course now I have shared these four cards I am getting all sorts of commentary. “Now you need to draw THE WHOLE DECK!” “And a companion book! Glen’s view of the Tarot!” And I am struggling really hard not to do this because wow… it sounds like so much fun. I could learn the Tarot while drawing it! And there’s actually places I could print a self published deck these days. But who would buy them?! Glen isn’t that famous yet. Maybe someday…
The Making of Glen
I admit the past few Glen comics were… pretty quick and easy to draw. I’d become a bit lazy or maybe I was just lacking inspiration, I don’t know, but this week I was all in! And I had to do this in SO MANY LAYERS. Thirty-three to be exact and it wasn’t enough!
I learned that illustration can be moved and resized without issue but for whatever reason the text remains stubbornly where you put them. However the little grabby tool that looks like an arrow hovering over a cube works really well to just drag the text wherever. This was so much easier than the cut and pasting I was doing!
I’m also learning how to draw my characters from different poses and angles which sounds easy but wasn’t. Hanging Glen upside-down, putting things in his paws, and drawing the suicidal teddy lobbing itself out a window was difficult! Not to mention remembering how the hell I was making flames before! I think I failed there, honestly, but it doesn’t look that bad either.
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!
The Making of Glen
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.
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.
The Making of Glen
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.
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.
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.
