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!
This week’s Glen started out as a morbid joke and somehow ended up in a really well suited pun. It refers to an actual real-life species of caterpillars called the gum leaf skeletoniser. I had no idea when I was drawing said comic that they’re also affectionately nicknamed mad hatterpillars!
The Making of Glen
This week’s panel is super simple. It was an easy image born from the fact a week’s worth of cleaning house has left my brain soup. Next week I will try to invite more complexity.
I’m not going lie – I had a whopper of a migraine this week which threw me for days so I was not with-it enough to draw and post a Glen on Wednesday. I apologize for all the adult children out there weeping because hump day was missing a certain blue caterpillar.
With that being said it looks like Glen spent those two days wandering the neighborhood like a feral cat… SIIIIIGH.
The Making of Glen
OK, so this whole comic was very spur of the moment and I didn’t spend a lot of time on it… still, this is the first time I attempted drawing Glen behind glass. I hope the little paw and tongue smudges were worth it.
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.
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.
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.
The Making of Glen
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!
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,
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,
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!
Inspiration strikes in the strangest places sometimes. Today it came from a single line in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The words in question were, “homicidal dirt muppet.” Hilarious without explanation but what the hell is a homicidal dirt muppet?! Clearly it’s a zombie Elmo clawing his way out of the grave with a giant hunting knife clenched in his teeth like the final scene of Freaks. Right? Apparently that’s what my deranged mind thinks… Glen as usual is not really happy with me putting him in this scene as you can tell. He has a thing with Elmo. I don’t know what but the two seem to have some sort of blood feud going. It’s like every time I turn my back he’s picking a fight with some other random character.
I debated whether or not I wanted to post this for Halloween but I decided against it as homicidal dirt muppets can appear at any time of year.
Today’s comic is brought to you by the word Muppet:
Muppet (plural muppets) (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, slang, derogatory) An incompetent or foolish person.
Muppet (plural muppets) (American) A fuzzy puppet with big boggly eyes.
