Contrary to popular belief, dead fish do NOT swim in bars...

I drew a comic strip. It's in Hebrew, so roughly translated for you anglophiles out there, it goes:

Panel 1:
1st Fish: "So I says to her, you wanna go to my pond or yours?"

Panel 2:
1st Fish: "And she ends up going off with this Japanese swordfish. Stinkin' tourists."

Panel 3:
1st Fish: "Dude, you with me, or what? Hey, dude? Bro?"

Panel 4:
Quote: "Even dead fish swim with the current".

Yes, well. "Tradutorre Traditore." Look it up.

Anyway, it's the first comic I've done in... oh... about four years I'd say? I don't count the photostuff I did with Comic Life last month. That's photos.

Thanks to my dear friend who got me drunk enough to draw this in a bar a couple weeks ago.

Erica's 50th Birthday Party

So Erica, my aunt, had her 50th birthday party.

I've uploaded photos to Flickr. You can probably also find it using tags for "erica melzer".

When you're on the page, you can subscribe to my flickr RSS 2.0 feed. For those of you unfamiliar with RSS (or Atom) and looking to learn more, just go here.
Make sure to get a compatible reader, like Firefox, IE7 or even Google Reader, if you have a Google Account.

I'm finally catching up to technology, and I'm not liking it.

My brain is having an information overload.

I'm going offline for ever. For those of you wishing to contact me, send me a snailmail letter and I'll send you back a god-damned homing pigeon.

Speakerphone

More playing around with Comic Life on the Mac.
After my previous experimentation, I decided to do a series of plays converted to comic using real life pictures of regular people.

But that didn't quite work out -- I'm still building up a library of enough pictures of people in dialogue before I can start matching scenes to them.

In the meantime, I've put together a 4 page booklet entitled "Speakerphone".

I didn't write the text. It's just been modified slightly to accommodate the story.


and a totally pointless title page, for when I get this on its own page on GooglePages.

Wednesday Madness!!!

Haha! Who'd'a thought, I'd be posting just one week later, heh?

Had a very interesting kumzitz the other day, and it appears that I've actually set up with Pazi for Monday evening to start work on, yep, -- the return of A Comic. We decided we'd be doing K-640 -- for those of you who've forgotten, it's the one that actually got published in print just before Senior Yours Truly had to get reinstated -- but I still hold Ping 972 near and dear to my heart I cut my teeth on that comic, and made some pretty bad-ass art for it! Which, sadly, I can't actually put up 'cos it's on a CD somewhere in the freakin' cupboard. I'll have to get around to fishing it out and putting some of my old stuff on here. This weekend. I don't have a fancy network with a fileserver storing all my stuff for me throughout the ages.

As for my drawing classes, those are progressing quite interesting, and I'm putting up some stuff I did today not for you guys, but for me to look at a while away and say hey wow, did I do that then? huh.

I started out with this face just to warm up. I know it looks crooked, 'cos as usual I don't ahve a scanner, but I think it came out pretty straight. The thing that I find amazing is that I just couldn't get the faces right in the past. The proportions, the locations, the shapes of things and their shading, just never saw it before. So ok, it's still a long way away, and I need some practice, but I was actually ready to forgo class this evening. Glad I didn't do that.

But I was still unsatisfied with the whole shading deal. I've always read in the books that you have to start doing those spheres and blocks, and you know what? I always made a half-hearted attempt that very rarely amounted to anything, and I would dismiss the exercise on the "yeah, yeah, I get it" argument.

But I went ahead and did the exercise anyway. And it was pretty tough. It's getting the shading done right that's hard. Started out with a few simple maneuvers just to get warmed up. That was simple enough, but as you can see it was far from convincing.
A little bit more work, using a nice, soft 6B pencil, and it looks like I might be headed in the right direction. the shape is starting to blend in smoothly with the background, and the shading is starting to look more gradual and yet smoother.





I did one more trial run, and tried to focus on using the pencil differently to do the shading. I had started out with a sharp tip, holding the pencil horizontal against the paper and running it from side to side. But once it was worn down, I did the second sketch using the tip with the pencil straight up, filling surfaces with parallel lines and then blurring them with my thumb and fingers till I got a near-even surface. It looked very different, and I was content with trying out different techniques, which ultimately led me to my last iteration of that god damned sphere. It's pretty tough, doing these shadings. And then I have to apply this to real shapes? Holy-mother-of-crap-with-Jesus-in-a-box!
I call it "The All-Seeing Bleaaah". I don't quite know why, but who cares? My next comic is going to be so fucking cool. For me, anyway.

Grab the Feed!

Yep, you can now grab the Atom (I think it's RSS, too?) feed right here, or you can just click the feed icon in the address bar to add to your Live Bookmarks!

That'll keep all y'all up-to-date so you no needless checking of a blog what don't update none too often.

This Week in Jono-land

Let's see...

College application.
Job stress (it's only my second month!)
Didn't practice drawing.
I think I'm taking a barbiturate.
Oh, yes. And haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past. It's fucking May, and I'm Jewish.

All in all, a good week I would say.

And it's only bloody Tuesday.

Sweet mother of Hypnos!

This is what I was prescribed for my sleep disorder?

Jesus christ, but army doctors are fucking insane. I never got any of this information from the neuroquack. And here I am picking it up again. Well, four more days 'till I'm "saturated".