Ya gotta love square food.

I’m trying to figure out how to do a better job of drawing people sitting on chairs.

Work asked me to resize a cartoon yesterday for use on social media (because bloody Faecesbook’s preferred size is the utterly awkward 1200 by 627 pixels). The social media team chose an old image (why always the old ones?!), and I couldn’t find the original.

I did this one a while ago, and while the message is clear, I feel like the background is garbage and the characters are drawn too quickly. (Like, WTF is happening with that woman’s hand?)

I figured I’d redraw it and do a fancier job this time — because newer is always better, right? So I foolishly decided to emulate a Van Gogh painting. How hard could that be to do in a hurry?

His:

Mine:

It does the job, but the two figures don’t feel like they’re from the same world. And I hate the awkward way they’re sat in their chairs (which I’d pictured as proper Parisian chairs Craig always wanted, and now we have four unfinished ones of in our garage).

So today I have to draw a bunch of people around a boardroom table, and I’m trying to figure out a way to do it better. So far that’s involved trying to get 3D models in Clip Studio paint — which then promptly forgot all my saved custom materials along with the previously downloaded 3D content.

So while all that gets restored from cloud backup, I decided to find a SketchUp 3D model…

That works, but the problem remains of posing figures in the scene, and SketchUp models aren’t editable (well, not by me).

So I got out my little ModiBot figures to create some real-world shapes I can follow:

Now I have to bring all this stuff together somehow… and actually draw something!

This is how I spend my days. I may sound frustrated, but who am I kidding? This is playing.

On the side over the past few months, I’ve produced a couple of little pocket-zines, one on the subject of money, one on time.

I want to have more work of my own to show, and I figure that waiting to produce some magnum opus is a recipe for never creating anything, so instead I’m trying to lower the bar and just produce everything.

These zines came from a good piece of advice I heard in a podcast: “Take all your stuff and turn it into things.” I’ve thought a lot about these two topics — time and money — and while I’m nowhere near an expert, I’ve figured out a few things that I figured I’d share.

You can download the zines and supplemental materials from the following page. (If you’d like a printed copy, just let me know and I’ll get you one somehow.)

http://hame.land/downloads/

Mister Chicken got too threadbare to revive, so he went down to my workshop to be reincarnated.

He donated some organs to the cause (stuffing, squeaker, and legs).

Behold, a bird reborn! Meet… The Blackbird!!

Doug, like all dogs, has neophilia: He loves new things. He loves them so much that he wants to devour them.

Well, at least part of my dream came true!