So this week I have been listening to a lot of Pink Floyd… take that as you will.
I didn’t do anything fancy in this week’s Glen but I did find myself a human spellchecker!! (Which erased my need to post, fix, and then repost like I did the previous two weeks…)
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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*~*
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
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!
It’s my favorite month of the year – October! And since Halloween is just around the corner I thought this week’s comic should be about something spooky – and that’s how I came up with spiders. Keeping to my musical theme the only song I could think of was The Who’s Boris the Spider and for some reason that combined in my head with Charlotte’s Web and before I knew it there was a torrid break up scene wheeling its way through my strange mind.
So there you have it. How spider break ups work. An answer to a question no one asked.
This song came to me one day when I decided to let YouTube play whatever it wanted to. After about four hours it fell face first into a pocket of modern British music that was completely and utterly new to me- a hapless American just trying to mess with the algorithms. This led to four more hours of nervous laughter and confusion as I went about my daily chores, occasionally looking up to see what was playing. At one point the Arctic Monkey’s Cornerstone came up and I couldn’t turn away. This wasn’t the raucous happy music that was playing before it. It was just…. face-peelingly awkward. Of course this endeared me to it because I fucking love English awkwardness. Peep Show level awkwardness.
So this lodged itself in my brain as I listened. The only problem is I found this particular accent to be a smidge hard to understand at times so it’s not really that surprising I got it wrong and heard, “I kept my chocolates to myself” instead of, “I kept my shortcuts to myself” but at that point I couldn’t change it. The image was already planted in my head. WITH CHOCOLATES. Because chocolate makes everything better. So do itchy red sweaters. An homage to the original video. And you know what? Now that I know what the lyrics actually are I’m still hearing chocolates.
So now you know what happens when you mix awkward lyrics, bad ears, and a rubbery caterpillar. Stuff. Lots of stuff.
