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Saturday’s Highs and Lows

Monday, May 7, 2012

On Saturday, Tod and I hopped into 1314‘s car and headed down to Docking Bay 93, a comic book store which always has artists draw free sketches for kids on Free Comic Book Day. The writer & artist for Kat-Nap was also there, though Greg was lucky enough not to have to sit through me talking about dog farts for half an hour.

Last year I mostly drew favorite animals; this year I asked kids what their superpower would be, and drew them using it mostly for evil. (Well, at least to avoid homework.) I didn’t get photos of all the sketches I did, but here are a few of the highlights:

Avindea goes invisibleI know that’s what I’d do if I was invisible. I’d find a bunch of people mysteriously standing in a line facing one direction and then drag a paintbrush over their bellies! I’m quite mature.

 

Arriona freezes peopleThe girl who asked for the power to freeze people was way too innocent-looking!

Samuel lasers stuffSoon, themes began to develop.

Roland shoots websLike the destruction of homework…

sketch of Spiderman for a kidAnd Spiderman, who I really don’t know much about, because honestly, I think he’s one of the worst superheroes. If I wanted to read about a pretty boy who’s constantly sad because he doesn’t get what he wants, I’d read sappy shoujo romances backward, and at least if I was reading in Japanese I wouldn’t understand the heavy-handed dialogue. However, I do understand his appeal, since his powers are really bad-ass. And at least Spiderman’s powers have limits. Superman is just a walking, talking, flying cheat code with bad fifties hair.

Yet another theme was My Little Pony! Here is a roller derby pony:

roller derby My Little Pony by Puss in Boots

Last but not least, an unflattering caricature of the proprietor of the shop, Dan, as a My Little Pony. (He is much better looking as a human. If you don’t believe me, go buy some comics from him.)

nerdy dude MLP

My friend Hats joined us after a time, and she drew this beguiling tall ship with pinball flippers on the gunports. Haha! :D

tall ship with pinball flippers by Hats

Those are pretty much all HIGHS, right? Where are the LOWS, you ask?

Well, that happened after I went home, and my dogs stole an entire bag of sugar from the counter and split it between them. At first it just seemed to make them hyper and thirsty, which is normal, but then they decided to leave me several presents over the course of the night, waking me up every time so I could go mop it up. Because I like you, I won’t show you the photos of Hanzo’s vomity magnum opus, which included kibble, carrot, grass, and bonus!cat turds, because apparently the sugar wasn’t the only thing he got into. EEEEEWW!

It was probably cosmic retribution for drawing Dan as a fuzzy, potbellied brony.

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Sunday: Silver

Sunday, May 6, 2012

silver tree in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park

Silver tree in the Olympic Sculpture Park on Seattle’s waterfront.

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Monsterpede: Finished pages 01 – 04

Saturday, May 5, 2012

FOUR PAGES ARE FINISHED! Ish.

very first page of Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

Poor Monsterpede. For awhile I locked it in the Harry Potter cupboard with my paints, but it’s now out on the table again.

pages 02 and 03 of Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

The above image is a watercolor sky with touches of marker on the edges, especially in the red by the water. All the mountains, water, and city are markers.

Do you remember the mockup? I like the finished one better, but I still really like the scribbly simplicity of the mockup.

page 04 of Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

Not sure if I like the pawprint on this last one. As my friend Dan pointed out, it looks sort of glowy. I may just make it darker and redder, but with sharper edges. (The reason it’s like this is I was trying to keep the color values without showing you the marker streaks in the black part. But now I’m not sure I like the color values.)

Well, I did all the easy pages. Now to do all my commissions in a procrastination tantrum. Hey, as far as tantrums go, I guess a productive art-making one is better than the kind where you break your roommate’s belongings in the middle of the intersection at three a.m. and scream a bunch until your neighbor calls the cops. Like my next-door-neighbor does, because he’s psychopants.

You know what though? He’s probably lonely. We should set him up on a blind date with the craziest person YOU reluctantly deal with. Describe them, please.

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Monsterpede: Making pages 02-03

Friday, May 4, 2012

Markers are my favorite medium, as you probably noticed by now. The other media live in the Harry Potter cupboard and are only given scraps to work on. Today, however, I let the water colors out because I needed to color in a sky, and not only do markers tend to leave too many lines when you color in huge expanses, they’re not quite subtle enough.

cloud tests for Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

Here, I’m using a combination of ink washes, watercolor, and markers to try different cloud effects. The ink washes looked the cloudiest, but they were also the wrong shades of red/black, so watercolors won.

cloud faces for Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

When I was done, I turned the clouds into a bear and an emoticon.

supplies & pages 02 - 03 of Monsterpede by Puss in Boots

This is the finished two-page spread, surrounded by several of the supplies used to make it.

I’ll post the (mostly) polished versions of the first four pages tomorrow!

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Clarion West Yearbook

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

When I was a kid, maybe like six or seven years old, my mom decided to make collages of what her life was like now, and what she wanted her life to be like. Neither collage made much of an impression on me at the time (I bet she’d get all kinds of unwelcome psychoanalysis if I looked at them now) but the act of making them did. I believed in the idea of pasting together a life you wanted from already existing media. That last part is important, especially for someone like me, who can cheat and draw their “dream life” with a pen. Hunting down and clipping out the things you want mirrors the act of searching out and utilizing resources in real life. In this case, a pen would be a magic wand, which I don’t actually have.

This is only tangentially related, because the collage I’m showing you has nothing to do with changing my life, and more to do with preparing for Clarion West. It’s a good idea to arrive at the workshop with a bunch of ideas, and when my dad sent me a surprise $20, I decided to splurge on the supplies for an idea book which could double as a little handmade yearbook.

Cory Skerry's Clarion West yearbook

It’s still unfinished, but it’s getting there. The back is even less finished than the front. It still needs a cask of wine, a musical instrument, and something blatantly tactile, though I’m not sure what.

back cover of Cory Skerry's Clarion West yearbook

I dug through my collage supplies, which I’ve been accumulating for years (the oldest one is a picture of a cat I cut out of a magazine when my mom made her collages, so it’s at least twenty-two years old). I also dug through the manila envelopes of art references my grandfather collected before his Parkinson’s got so bad that he couldn’t draw anymore. That’s where I fond this one, though the fortune at the top obviously came from a cookie:

leopard collaged with cookie fortune about wealth

That’s the first page. I’m looking forward to pasting in visuals that I find inspiring with notes about characters, settings, conflicts, and plot twists. My weird habit of not throwing away the program books for cons has been validated, since it resulted in hundreds of panel descriptions which make great story prompts. It’s going to be great fun filling these pages!

That said, I need to go do other things now… like Monsterpede, which is glaring at me balefully from beneath my markers, where it was stuffed so it didn’t get glue on it. I’ve fallen way behind my schedule on Monsterpede, but I’m not too worried about it–I’ve had other things to keep me busy, and I don’t see any point in sweating blood over a self-imposed deadline while I have real ones over which to sweat, cry, and pee my blood.

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Pit Bull Tuesday: Zeus Survives a Fire

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Thank you, brave firefighters, not just for going into a burning building to look for victims, but for seeing a dog that needed help and helping it without judging it by what kind of dog it was. I know there are people that would have been afraid to pick up a pit bull because of their undeserved reputation. I’m glad these rescue personnel were wiser than that. <3

 

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I Didn’t Want To Go On Your Stupid Quest Anyway

Monday, April 30, 2012

Two weeks ago, I had a burst of inspiration for one of my novels, a fantasy quest with goblins, elves, werewolves, and a crabby dragon. So I rewrote the first chapter to include more hookers.

goblin + elf + werewolf + dragon + hooker

It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it books: the reader either finds it uproariously funny (Jay Lake did, because he has a dirty sense of humor) or they can’t even finish it (like my poor mom, who is probably glad I’m now publishing under a pseudonym). I obviously believe in it or I wouldn’t be willing to put in the effort to send it out, but I admit, I am a little afraid of the day it gets published. Then every time someone says, “Oh, what’s your novel called?” and I oblige them, they’ll realize I’m that guy.

The guy who used the word “dickcheese” as if it was a legitimate contribution to the English language.

Anyway, I submitted it to Angry Robot‘s Open Door last night. Here’s the query that I fleshed out into the two-page synopsis they asked for:

Perret has stolen everything from purses to cargo to a corpse (hey, he was really drunk–and setting it on fire was an accident). He’d like to keep being the slutty rockstar of the kingdom’s dock thieves, but his reputation for being able to steal anything gets him kidnapped by a party of adventurers on a mission for the king. They want to “liberate” five powerful magical artifacts, the archgems, from secret locations guarded by scary-ass traps and even scarier-ass monsters.

It’s always been easy for Perret to fear colonizing insects, which he can see and scream at any day, and dismiss rare monsters like “darklings” as mere granny tales. He soon finds exactly what used to lurk in the closet (besides his own sexuality) before the Great War, however: the goblins, trolls, and various other nasties that once had the run of the kingdom have fled north, and they now pay a mage named Viokis for protection from the human regime. When Viokis hears about the quest, he sends Perret an ultimatum: give fake gems to his companions and bring the real gems to Viokis, or get marinated in torture-sweat before being served alive at a werewolf banquet.

Backstabbing his captors is an easy choice until Perret discovers the gems were created through genocide, a process that both Viokis and the king will want to reproduce. Oops. Perret has stolen these ancient weapons from their safe hiding places, and now he’s stuck with them. With his wits, his growing sense of morality (he was shocked, too), and his sticky fingers, Perret has to come up with a way to keep everyone from killing each other… and him.

Some of my novels have much wider appeal, but people who like this one like it fiercely. That’s encouraging, because if I can’t make it as a novelist, I can obviously make it as the leader of a crass, puerile cult. I’ll call it Youforgottozipupyourflyentology.

goblin + elf + werewolf + dragon + hooker

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Sunday: Orange

Sunday, April 29, 2012

some kind of lily

The amnesia lily ranges from subtropical to temperate climates, enjoys medium to strong sunlight, and an abundance of water. It relies entirely on fairies and well-meaning idiots for pollination. It has never been successfully grown in a human garden.

Hikers spot the lily, smell it, fall in love with it, and decide that it’s okay just this once to dig up a wild plant, because it clearly doesn’t belong out here anyway, and it should go in a garden where more people can enjoy it, and deer won’t nibble on it, because after all wouldn’t it be bad for the deer, since it’s probably not even edible, maybe poisonous, and everyone would be happier if they just brought it home with them. Hikers rarely carry gardening tools, however, so they mark the place on their maps, with GPS coordinates, or simply trust that its celestial brilliance will stand out a second time as well. They may spot multiple lilies, smelling (and pollinating) them as they move along the trail. The pollen has amnesiac properties, however, and by the time they reach the trailhead and their vehicle, they’ve forgotten all about why this was such a splendid hike. It just was. Later, if they decide to visit the star on their map, they may find the lily again, but they still won’t have thought to carry gardening tools.

Sometimes, a friend or relative will spot the pollen on their nose and ask, “Have you been eating Cheetos?”

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He’s going to regret kissing me on camera.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

…Everyone always does.

zoidberg and farnsworth makeout, with Seamus O'Carey and Puss in Boots' faces

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A pistol, a stowaway, and a rescue mission!

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The other day when we were at the beach, Seamus found a pistol among the rocks at low tide. Of course at first we were like, “Cool! MURDER WEAPON!” but it was just a BB gun, so if it murdered anything I guess it was a frog or the integrity of a road sign or maybe someone’s window, and that’s why an angry parent threw it into the bay.

Seamus thought it would be fun to take it home and steampunk it out, since he does that with Nerf guns all the time. So he took it apart…

half of a bebe gun

And maybe you already where this is going, but he didn’t, because there were no openings on the gun large enough to explain how this guy got inside:

little shore crab crawling out of a Tic-Tac container

My theory is that when he was smaller, he crawled in through the barrel, and since nothing else could fit in there to eat him, he just kept eating and growing. He’s lucky Seamus popped that pistol open when he did, because the crab was already too large to get out. It reminds me of something that happens in one of my stories, but I won’t tell you which one because I still hope to publish it, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. :)

I decided that a little thug crab who lives inside a gun would be happiest in a neighborhood like this:

Hobotat under Roeder Avenue

Crabitat under Roeder Avenue

So I dumped him (and his little sand flea roommates) into the sea, where the arrow on the right is.

And he lived happily-ever-eaten-by-a-heron-an-hour-later!

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