Have I ever mentioned how much more fun it is, drawing trees and dirt than it is drawing buildings, windows and cars?
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Posts Tagged hubris
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I’ve never had an issue with snakes in sleeping bags. I was fascinated to see a few scorpions when a tent was lifted up first thing in the morning. That was cool.
Hindsight, blindsight… Blind Blonde, Blind Optimism…
YOU guys oughta try naming these things. Some days, nothin’. Some days, you get a choice. If I was smarter… or dumber… I’d work farther ahead and be naming these things in the mornings when my brain works better. On the other hand, I’d spend more time on them, and who knows what else I should be doing with THAT time? Somebody’s logo? Another cartoon map? Laundry?
Oh, the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley… or something like that. Scottish people. They talk funny and probably blinded themselves with their night vision goggles r’else they wouldn’t have come up with that ol’ saw.
Oops. First, I lost the internet/cable on account of a large pecan limb attacking the wires in my back yard.
Then, as I’m trying to get things done til I get my cable back, my desktop Apple dies. Dies BIG TIME. Damn.
Anyway, here’s a cartoon that I had to jump through hoops to get to you.
Not sure how tomorrow’s gonna be. Hang tight.
Oops. I forgot my new feature- Throwback Thursday.
So, better late than never, here’s the very first appearance of Lowell.
If you’ve ever wondered why Lowell has the haircut, glasses and build that he does- this is why.
I admit, shaping a character for the sake of a sight gag is pretty lazy. But Lowell wasn’t supposed to take on the… large silhouette… that he has. I just thought he’d be the irritating neighbor. Of course, as his thoughtlessly cruel behavior became more useful for storytelling and for leaving a lingering bitter (acquired) taste in the mouths of readers, he stuck around for the fun.
You know how it is… you got a job to do, and you don’t wanna give up on it. Just one more minute.
That kind of behavior was bad enough, and then they invented Facebook.
Thank you, Proamericana, for the suggestion that I fill the silence of Thursdays with the now trope-y but totally workable THROWBACK THURSDAY!
This one is from 2012, back when Hubris was still gag-a-day, like so many comic strips are. There are a few comics featuring Hubris and Kara attending church or funerals. I can’t recall which early stage of development spawned this particular cartoon, but it was probably pretty late in the series of revisions for the syndicate. I was very lucky to have Amy Lago (first at United Media, then at Washington Post Writer’s Group) giving me advice about how to bring Hubris (originally called ‘Because It’s There’) up to scratch. One of the suggestions she made that I didn’t really care for, and didn’t do while I was still pestering her with new packages, ultimately resulted in both Lowell and Durnell- well after I’d turned the project into the webcomic you’re staring at now.
I wonder how Hubris would have done if I’d taken her advice, and taken the time to crank out a couple more packages, and gotten one of the syndicates to pick it up. It was late in the day as things were getting worse all the time for newspapers and syndicates, so I imagine it’d be… a lot like it is now, except I couldn’t have changed the format to the vertical form the way I did.
How many of you guys draw?
Here’s the thing- I learned to draw with a brush years ago, and it’s served me very well for a lot of reasons. And now Kolinsky Sable brushes are very hard to get. They’re the best brushes for inking with. Seriously, they’re great. Raphael brushes, Isabey, or Windsor-Newton Series 7s. Nice lines.
But like I said, they’re hard to get these days.
So, needing new brushes, you try out what’s available. Especially if your friends recommend them.
I think I’ve mentioned here before that I got a nice brush pen with ink cartridges that I liked quite a bit. Twenty bucks for the pen, and maybe 11 bucks for a pack of refill cartridges. It took some getting used to, but it seemed to be a good thing. Plus, without the ink bottles, and the little pads of paper for pointing my brush, and the careful cleanup of Kolinsky Sable brushes, the nifty little Pentel brush pen seemed so convenient. And it IS convenient.
But I got out the ol’ Kolinsky Sable brush again, cleaned it carefully just in case, cracked open a new bottle of Higgens Black Magic ink and drew the latest couple of cartoons.
And I realize that as nice and convenient and seemingly as slick as that Pentel brush pen is, the control and the line and the feel and the final product that comes off a good brush with good ink is far superior.
Honestly, for the past few months, I’ve been kicking myself and wondering why my backgrounds had gotten so… dull. I thought I was losing my touch, or my eyesight, or something.
But it was the brush. Using the sable brush again, I dived at the backgrounds and enjoyed the lines and appreciated the feel of the whole thing much, much better.
I think the last time I mentioned that brush pen, someone commented that they hadn’t noticed the change in the art. And that’s good news. But I think, unless something goes pretty squiffy, I’ll be happier drawing with my stupidly expensive, hard-to-get brushes.
And so, if any of you guys draw… there’s some mindless cartoonist trivia for you.
For everyone else… Hey, look! it’s a cartoon about eating a bug! Hahahahahahaha!
Baby raccoon. Cuuuuuuute. But you should have heard the li’l guy when the service came to cart him away for relocation. The guy had to transfer the raccoon from the trap to the box in which he could be transported.
Up until the guy showed up, you’d have thought the baby raccoon would have gone quietly. Cute little scared fellow.
Nah. They sound like the Tasmanian Devil in a blender. You never heard such random, angry sounds that clearly translate into “I’d much rather you did not touch me. Go to Hell. Right now, if convenient.”
Snarling. That’s probably what it was.
Anyhow, the guy finally had to sort of upend the trap onto the box and wait for the raccoon to drop into the box, which he did not do.
One of my cousin’s kids suggested that they gently coax the raccoon with a twig to the backside through the bars of the trap. And after the guy said that might not do any good, it did.
One very angry baby raccoon, off to be relocated to some stretch of Wisconsin woodlands where six others had already been carted.
And maybe the ones that are left will be joining them before they eat any more chickens. Or not.
