Non-Gravity

bendyroad: We entered Apartment Therapy’s Small Cool contest...

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:03 -0700

We entered Apartment Therapy’s Small Cool contest because we live in a tiny, tiny apartment. We screwed up the form so just Matt’s name is on it and they made up the title but it’s fun to see up there.

As you can see in the floorplan I drew, we wanted to call it “Damhnait & Matt’s Peculiar Piso” but we didn’t get to pick the title. This is my second go-around in the Small Cool Contest, I won the Southwest regional in 2008. Damh says I bragged about that on our first date but I don’t remember, I was probably bragging about a lot of things.

Insel-Bücherei

Mon, 13 May 2013 01:40:26 -0700

Insel-Bücherei:

While we were in Vienna, I walked through tiny plaza flea market and found a box of beautiful old books. I didn’t buy any because they were all in German and I thought that would be pretty extravagant, buying a bunch of books I couldn’t read simply because they were pretty. But they were really pretty you guys. I should have bought one, but every time I picked up one I wanted to buy the whole box. Instead I committed the flea market sin of just writing down the publisher’s name so I could look up the books when I got home.

A collection of Insel-Bücherei books on Flickr.

Guys! How do we make a bench? We need a bench/shoe-shelf in the...

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:35:10 -0700

Guys! How do we make a bench? We need a bench/shoe-shelf in the hallway and we found these two tiny doors while going for a walk yesterday. Some mid-century-mod-wire-legs would be lovely but I’m not sure if we’ll find any here. I drew up a few quick designs. We could make two benches and put them side by side, but it might crowd our hallway and I think one bench with a shelf would be better. What do people think? Any other styles or designs I haven’t thought of?

josephdreamboatlevitt: I wish I could find the source for...

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:49:00 -0700

josephdreamboatlevitt:

I wish I could find the source for this, to properly credit it. Best thing I’ve seen online forever.

While I’m sourcing things on Tumblr: the guy who created the image is microstock vector artist Leremy Gan, pretty sure the aqua tint was added when the image appeared on Jezebel with the article ‘Every Single Woman in America Is Now Curvy’ — and That’s a Good Thing and it looks like the words come from a defunct Facebook group called “Inner Subversion.” Is sourcing-orphaned-works-on-the-internet a job? Matthew Melis: Internet Detective.

thedoubleclicks: annetdonahue: The importance of consent:...

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:25:00 -0700

thedoubleclicks:

annetdonahue:

The importance of consent: a narrative.

Huge fan of this.

Dammit Tumblr, sometimes things like this come up and I just need to keep digging through reblogs just to find some hint of what it is I’m looking at. Thousands of people crediting the person who made the .gif (but not linking to the actual post that contained all the relevant tags) and thousands retaining the “importance of consent” bit, but almost no one saying that this is Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (1933). I know my film education has holes in it but I want to find these films and watch them so you gotta help me out here.

Helene and I made a delicious Pecan Pie this weekend with the...

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:50:00 -0700

Helene and I made a delicious Pecan Pie this weekend with the last of the precious imported pecans. The crust was from Smitten Kitchen and the pie filling was from Pioneer Woman, but instead of Corn Syrup, Helene had an idea to use caramel instead, so we made a simple caramel and mixed it with a bit of sweetened condensed milk and the melted butter. It was really hard to mix the pie filling with the caramel constantly cooling and hardening but despite the lumpy batter it all melted again perfectly in the oven. Served with a bit of whipped cream. I forgot to take pictures before bringing the pie to Kate’s so I took pictures there with her amazing view. I want to take all my baking pictures there from now on.

Allotment update! The mint has started to sprout and...

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:31:00 -0700

Allotment update! The mint has started to sprout and there’s a few leaves popping up in the strawberries. We shuffled the pots to make room for our newest addition: seedlings from an Austrian sour-cherry tree!

NSFW! I’m really enjoying the Penny Arcade reality show...

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:48:00 -0700

NSFW!

I’m really enjoying the Penny Arcade reality show Strip Search, fans have been using the elimination challenges as drawing exercises, so this week I decided to play along. It’s REALLY HARD. This is what I came up with in 90 minutes, as you can see I didn’t finish before pencils-down so I would have been eliminated! I spent a few more hours cleaning it up and posted the finished version to Non-Gravity. « Also NSFW of course

bendyroad: I made strawberry scones for breakfast this morning....

Thu, 02 May 2013 03:48:39 -0700

bendyroad:

I made strawberry scones for breakfast this morning. I’m not the baker in this house so I was pretty excited they turned out so delicious.

I went a bit mad with the scone photography.

The seedlings we planted five days ago have already started to...

Thu, 02 May 2013 03:45:40 -0700

The seedlings we planted five days ago have already started to sprout! I should have taken pictures yesterday when we first noticed them popping up, I’m not so good at timelapse photography. Our avocado root also reached the bottom of our small glass, so we gave it a taller glass.

Fun with Photoshop. Original photo: here. EDIT: Shooter McGavin?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 01:10:00 -0700

Fun with Photoshop. Original photo: here.

EDIT: Shooter McGavin?

This is my hearty endorsement of proofreading! Not only did I...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:55:00 -0700

This is my hearty endorsement of proofreading! Not only did I spell “menial” wrong, but menial doesn’t even make sense in this context. “Menial worker” and “minimum wage” got crisscrossed in my brain. Damh spotted the mistake(s), she’s now proofreading the entire Hats script before I embarrass myself further.

We went nuts and bought a load of colourdy pots for our ongoing...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:46:00 -0700

Our avocado see sprouted a root! No stalk yet, but this is the furthest we've ever gotten before!

Damhnait said I could have the red pot for planting my pips.

We went nuts and bought a load of colourdy pots for our ongoing gardening attempts. We transplanted the surviving basil and got a bunch of new seeds. Also our latest vegbox.

I made Red Velvet Cake with beets! Beet Cake! Like most of my...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:34:39 -0700

I made Red Velvet Cake with beets! Beet Cake! Like most of my desserts it looks ugly but tastes delicious. I was going to follow Nigel Slater’s beet cake recipe but it was too much trouble so instead I substituted beets for some of the milk and butter in my go-to NYT red velvet cake recipe. The taste of beets was still very present, but I thought it played off of the chocolate really well and ended up liking it a whole lot. The red wasn’t very red, but I still prefer this to food coloring.

I was a little disappointed by the amount of detail I was...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:41:00 -0700

I was a little disappointed by the amount of detail I was fitting into the panels of that test page so I did this quick test to see if I’m better off using a sketchbook to draw one panel at a time.

On the comic boards, each panel is 7x11cm, if I use a sketchbook I can make them 10x16cm which gives me a lot more room to work with the Pentel brush. The downside is I can’t easily see how the panels relate to each other on the page which could lead to some awkward compositions when I get to the scanning/assembly stage. Hmmm.

Practice page! I was trying to figure out how I’m going to...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:09:00 -0700

Practice page! I was trying to figure out how I’m going to hand letter all the dialogue in Hats, so I did a practice page and tried a few things. In panel 1 I used the same Pentel brush I used for the characters, in panel 2 I used my fine-tip pen that I used for the borders and in panel 3 I used two calligraphy pens, first a fine-tip, then a regular-tip. Calligraphy pens are kind of a pain in the butt, but they do look nice. My sizes are all over the map on this page cause I was trying different things, for the amount of dialogue in this story I think the smaller I can go, the better. I didn’t get into the more professional lettering techniques (laying out lines, grids, etc), we’ll see if I can get away with playing loosey goosey.

Actually working in my final page size, the Pentel brush was a bit trickier to handle, harder to get the detail that I could on my larger sketchbook drawings. When it works it works really well but I kind of stopped trying after the center panel as you can see. I don’t know if I need to do a second test page to work out dialogue bubbles and panel borders.

The final art will also have blacks and greys, similar to Strong, but since I was focusing on the dialogue I didn’t want to bust out the brushes.

Another batch of Hats sketches are up on Non-Gravity. I’m...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:44:00 -0700

Another batch of Hats sketches are up on Non-Gravity. I’m about to start the final pages this week. Mistakes I’ve already caught: Alice’s cowboy boots look more like wellies since I didn’t draw the V/wing shape at the top of them, and I forgot what softball uniforms looked like and drew her in a baseball uniform. Reference photos are your friends!

My latest rejected Threadless submission, for their Incredible...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:12:00 -0700

My latest rejected Threadless submission, for their Incredible Hulk contest sponsored by Marvel. The reason given:

“Not our HULK - Marvel”

I thought I’d finally captured the Threadless style with this one: a bit of whimsy, mashing up two ironically opposed iconic images, the classic Hulk-vs-tank battle mixed with the famous Flower Power photos of Bernie Boston and Jan Rose Kasmir, and the classic Hulk themes of a monster who just wanted to be left alone.

It seems like the Hulk to me.

while visiting Vienna we stopped repeatedly in Café Prückel....

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:13:00 -0700

while visiting Vienna we stopped repeatedly in Café Prückel. it’s where I discovered that a Viennese Iced Coffee is basically a coffee float: cold coffee with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. it was my go-to drink for the rest of the trip.

while I spent most of my sketchbook time in Vienna working out Hats-comic-stuff, I had to take the time to draw some of Café Prückel’s lovely original furniture.

Vienna is super-serious about their cafes. I like the Madrid cafes, but I feel like I could live in the Viennese cafes and from the looks of it some people try.

vegbox/allotment update. If it looks as if our plants thinned...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:33:00 -0700

vegbox/allotment update. If it looks as if our plants thinned out a bit it’s because we were out of town twice for a week at a time, kind of amazing there’s anything left at all. The plan is to reward the survivors with nice pots soon.