Oh, it feels so good to be back after this unanticipated two week hiatus! I apologize for our conspicuous absence – it was a combination of technical difficulties and illness but we’re back on track now! And we’re tipping our hats to all you wonderful sci-fi geeks out there. You know we love you!
The Making of Glen
As with everything lately this comic started out as something completely different – a joke about space grasshoppers – but do you know how hard space grasshoppers are to draw?! I THOUGHT mechanical space spiders might be easier but whew… I’m not so sure now! Even so I had fun with this one and with the additional jokes coming from the mouths of the spiders themselves. The sci-fi genre should be careful or these little buggars might unionize and demand at least one series show them in a positive light!
I decided to do another homage to one of my all time favorites – the original Twilight Zone and it’s insanely iconic It’s a Good Life episode where one little boy gets to wish people away for not thinking happy thoughts. Where do they go? The cornfields! I know the sting of this no longer reaches most people because most people no longer have first hand experiences with cornfields but here’s why that’s so scary- because they’re extremely disorienting. It’s just rows and rows of corn with no way out. It’s a terrifying thought, probably first implemented in old German fairy tales where magic umbrellas would fly bad little boys and girls away to the proverbial cornfield. (Doesn’t that put a whole new light on Mary Poppins!)
Still – in this classic horror scenario Glen always manages to find a way to make it adorable. And I couldn’t be more proud.
The Making of Glen
I was actually lacking in inspiration this week when this idea popped into my head yesterday. I had spent all day fighting with technology on a different matter so by the time I was ready to sit down and illustrate it I was already on the punchy side which is not a great place to start with such a complex illustration. I had to look up cornstalks in an attempt to draw them. I drew one and copied it many times over to make a field and I applied the same process to the pile of corn which I moved the corn into different angles in order to make them look like a more convincing pile. I think it came out well! And I am proud of myself for once again pushing the boundaries of what I could do – going so far as to find an appropriate brush stroke for the top of the corn stalks to make them look loaded with pollen.
Initially I drew the image in color. I thought turning it into a black and white image would be as simple as applying a filter like you do with photos. HAHAHAHA. No, when I looked up how to do this in Clip Studio Paint I got a bunch of grotesquely long multi-step tutorials which I looked at with glassy eyes before cheating. I totally uploaded the illustration to LunaPic (dot com) and applied the black and white filter. Took all of two steps and 15 seconds from upload to black and white. I regret nothing (fully realizing that if I were to be professional about this I’d totally learn the correct way which probably allows me to do this without compressing the image. Whatever, I’m not making this into a billboard so it doesn’t matter.)
