Happy Thursday!
Once my husband asked me to draw for him an avatar to go with his online handle (you know, a name one made up for oneself and used consistently all across the internet to do cool things in underground cyber communities [like Neo and Trinity] in the days before people decided to settle for umpteen variations of BabyGurrrlRockerXXXChickHoneyMamaDoesADance111188827) . Anyway, his is Flying Turtle, which is cute but also has a bit of a Native American vibe to it. Here is the resulting doodle which he is still so kind to use in public. The Flying Turtle:
A flying turtle. Believe it or not, it comes from one of Shakespeare's poems. I forget how.
Like the wings and the purposeful use of medieval non-perspective with misplaced art nouveau? It’s intentional. Trust me.
I think this is a good time to explain a process that I’ve been wrestling with for a while now: hand-drawn line art, painted digitally. It seems to be the method of choice for web comic artists, unless you’re magical, super-sentient and have futuristic technology, like Dresden Codak. He can do anything – and he does it full-time. (I’m not swooning. I’m a married woman…)
But I am mortal, and though I do indeed have tablet-envy, I’ve figured out how to make do without my Neil Gaiman’s Gazebo. Here’s what I do: I draw something by hand, then I ink it with pens like Pigma Microns. After erasing the pencil, I scan it in with my fabulous, cube-like HP PSC 1210 All-In-One Printer/Scanner/Copier from circa 2004. After I pick up everything it knocked of the end table with its geriatric printer-convulsions, I curse a bit, rescan, maybe even re-rescan after I remember what things like “dots-per-inch” mean. Once I get an image that I can work with, I tweak the black and white drawing so that it looks clean, and the only colors are black and white, no grayscale smudges. Lastly, I use Gimp*, my tablet and stylus, and what I’ve felt to be an ingenious method of layers and transparencies that I pretend I invented myself, and I color it in with tools like airbrush, paint brush, and bucket-fill. And voila – you get the… um… well the weird little mish-mashed guy above.
AND – BUT! you also get this hare, drawn a little more recently, and with a gradient-fill – cuz’ it’s classy!
The reticent brown field hare in his natural habitat: the quasi-psychedelic gradient void.
Groovy.
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*Gimp is like Photoshop for Linux-users. Linux is like Windows for people whose husbands accidentally break the Windows partition of their hard drive.
