It’s been a crazy few days and sadly I totally forgot about Glen which is probably why this week’s Glen is so….. surreal.
I had no inspiration this week so I just opened my illustration program and started playing with the random effects until I realized it looked like a a Lisa Frank monstrosity and voila! This weirdly nostalgic comic came to life. I apologize I cannot draw a unicorn worth beans.
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*~*