Plaidophile

Thanks again for submitting your work for the Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery.

I’m pleased to say that your work has been selected for inclusion in our exhibition, and will be featured in the Virtual Gallery along with a wide array of webcomics from around the globe. This historic exhibition will include over 100 artists, making this one of the largest exhibitions in the Cartoon Art Museum’s 24-year history, and we’re thankful for your participation.

I am pleased as well! My stuff will be in a museum! I think this is only the second time this has happened.

Here's a full press release of the exhibit, and also you can read more about the goings-on at the Cartoon Art Museum on their LiveJournal.

I will have to finally go to CAM and maybe even meet Shaenon and Andrew in person!

After a conversation with Mark the other night, I think I have figured out what differentiates a "cartoon animal" from a "furry."

The big deciding factor appears to be: if a character is furred and also has human-like hair, they are furry. Otherwise they are a cartoon animal.

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Dear furry artists who insist on drawing platypi:

• They are not birds. The "duck" bill is an example of convergent evolution. They do not have feathers. They are not in any way "avian."
• Their eggs are soft-shelled and leathery like a snake's, not hard like a chicken's.
• The tail is shaped somewhat like a beaver's, but it's not actually a beaver tail (to start with, it's furred); it's a rudder and a fat reserve, not a piece of construction equipment. This also does not mean that they are in any other way like a beaver. In particular they don't have buckteeth, or in fact teeth at all. Moreover, this means that their tails are not like that of the following species:
  • Fox
  • Wolf
  • Squirrel
  • Dinosaur
  • Whatever the hell it is has long flowing locks of hair instead of a tail
• They do not have breasts or nipples. They secrete milk directly through the skin. I suppose you could take some artistic license and make them a bit curvy but they still shouldn't have gigantic nipples with areolae.
• Being monotremes (which literally means "one hole"), they have a cloaca, which the penis or vagina is hidden in. A hermaphroditic platypus would probably look just like a male platypus. They would not let it all "hang out."
• Also, if you really must insist on drawing one in a state of arousal, the penis has four heads on it.

From a spam email (all the spam parts removed). All below the cut.

So about a year ago I bought a bunch of different Wacom stylus nibs: some more of the standard acrylic ones, some of the spring-loaded "stroke" ones, and some of the compressed felt ones. By now I've actually used all three kinds regularly, so I'd might as well share some thoughts.

As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my better photos to my deviantART account and enrolled them (as well as some of my drawings) in the prints program. Are there any other no-effort artwork-selling things I should use as well? How is Flickr's "make stuff" thing for that? Should I even bother?

Oh, and uh, any specific other things I should make available as prints?

Okay, I learned that Pixelmator will have tablet support VERY SOON (on their Twitter page they announced that they finished implementing it about 11 hours ago, so of course the next release will really have it like they sorta-promised on their forums). So I decided to give it another shot, bearing in mind that tablet support would be coming.

It's pretty close to decent, though I still have a few complaints with it. Nothing that'll prevent me from buying it when 1.1 comes out, but there are many things I'd like to see them fix in the (preferably near) future:

So, for the last several years I've been using Photoshop 7 to draw my comics. Unfortunately, I've read that Photoshop 7 doesn't run under OSX 10.5 (which I really want to upgrade to), but I'm not going to spend the $oodles to upgrade to CS3 (the price seems to go up every week... it's $1000 now!). I'm having a hell of a time finding a drawing app which fits my needs without being an expensive high-end photo-editing suite, though. And yes, I've tried a lot of them.

So, the new Olympic Sculpture Park is now open, and being an outdoor gallery, they are having problems with people touching the art. But is that really a problem?

This artwork is outside, and is supposed to be corroded and weathered by the (somewhat unpredictable) environment. Shouldn't the environment also include the people who are viewing it?

This is also what I hate about MoMA. Modern art was all about new frontiers and interactivity and a dialog between the artist and the viewer, but sometime in the past 10 years it's all been put behind a hermetic seal.

I may have played a bit too much Paper Mario recently.

A couple of doodles I did at work today (decided to do a little bit of line of action). These might be the last things I draw for a while — tomorrow I'm finally getting tested for how severe my carpal tunnel syndrome is and find out what treatment is necessary and how royally screwed I am.

So, uh, enjoy.

So, I've been reading John K's weblog for a while and have finally decided that even though he warned that after the age of 24 it's too late to try learning how to draw right, it's time I learned how to draw right.

Tonight I did a few quick pencil sketches, some based directly on his lesson pictures and some based on the lessons learned from trying to emulate the lessons.

Seeing as how I went and made my site easier to manage, I decided to get around to something I'd been putting off: posting my photography.

Just recent stuff for now; when I go back to my parents' house for the holidays I'll try to remember to get all my negatives from when I was in high school.

Yesterday I heard from my mom that Reginald Gammon died. He was a very important artist in the 1960s civil rights movement, an amazing portrait painter and printmaker whose work has been in museums and galleries around the world with chapters written about hiim in art history textbooks, and most importantly, he was a very close friend of my family, and a great guy. The few times I got to talk with him were great experiences, and we will all miss him.

I feel like I'm drawing to a black hole.

Hey, cool, I just noticed that a one-minute vacation I recorded a while ago got posted this week. I guess my philosophical rambling was acceptable. :)