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!
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!
The Creation of Glen…
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,
Glen returns from a brief hiatus with a three panel comic on a new day! Hump Day! Which is when I will be posting all the new Glen comics from here on out in the hopes of gathering more love for this strange little caterpillar.
As for the Tinder? Well, he really pulled it out to show Boris from the last comic but alas, as usual he got carried away… as did I writing terrible puns into bug profiles which is WAY more entertaining than writing human profiles!
