Stumptown to vacation in no time flat

Here was my description of our trip to Stumptown to my co-worker:
"well, we drove to Portland Saturday morning and went to Stumptown Comic Fest. we only walked around for about an hour over the course of the whole day as we spent most of the time in panels. But somehow I still ended up with 6 blisters!! They we drove back and got home in plenty of time to miss the I-5 Northbound closure."

Because of one of the panels, Self Publishing like a Rockstar, I started reading Octopus Pie, which I am really enjoying.

Here is a blister montage. Haha.I didn't take a picture of the one on my big toe because you can't really see it. The ones on the arch of my left foot are by far the most painful.

The digital painting class was great. I started working on something last night. I don't know how it will turn out, but I have high hopes. I have a tiny portion of it done even though I worked on it for about 2 hours. I did keep messing up and having to fix that, but that just takes practice. The guy who does Dresden Codak led the session. It was really impressive to watch him take 30 minutes and make a really cute little pic. I learned the brush settings I need and stuff. Very cool. You know, I was going to write a huge long post about all the stuff I learned, but I am too lazy.

Since I will be gone for so long, here are some pics I have done. First, a color of the Creeper from before I took the digital painting class. This is just a completely different style of coloring from the digital painting. Probably much faster. I like both.

Next, here is a picture called 'Bunny Loves Robot.' I have not decided what to do with this pic yet. I drew it much smaller a long time ago. So I scanned it, printed it larger, traced it again while make it much better, and then I inked it.

When I get back from vacation, I should have a lot of shtuff to put up here and on deviant art. Or not. Depends on what I work on. I have grand plans. I have no idea how much I will get done because it is not often then I have this much time to work on art. I should have the thumbnails done for another graphic story and some drafts of the main characters. I might even have a funny digital painting of batman. I did an ink of it, but I hate it. I like the pencil still, but I might need to fix that too. I already packed a bunch of stuff for vacation. In addition to my art box, with my ink and brushes and some water colors and other random stuff, I packed a bag of paper: 9x12 water color, 11x17 Bristol board (two kinds: with and without the blue lines for comics), 9x12 Bristol board, lots of computer paper, water color sketch books (including the one with the original Umbrella Girl drawings, which I am thinking of redoing), and more. I would bring my 11x17 water color paper, but I can't find it anywhere and I am so bummed about it because there are two nice paintings in there. :'(

Completely non sequitor, if you like comics, you might want to watch the videos made by Crazy Sexy Geeks.

I also forgot to post this earlier. I drew this for Isaac in the car on the way up for his birthday. Haha.

Stumptown

We went to Stumptown this weekend. It was awesome.

Google maps estimated it would take us 4 hours to drive to Portland. Angela totally freaked out cause I'd told her it would take like 3 hours. We left at 6:45 and got there at 9:45 :-) I'm pretty sure the estimate was assuming traffic and there was none.

We walked through the booths on the main floor but neither of us particularly enjoys large crowds of people so we went straight to the seminar things that we were really interested in. We saw one about digital painting which was primarily for Angela but I found it to be fascinating. Then we went to one on copyright and IP law. It was long, like 2 hours, but very interesting as well. Next up was one on story telling without words that turned out to be a dud. It was more like a low quality free college class than a seminar. We left early. Last up was Self Publishing like a Rock Star which was both funny and interesting.

Then we spent all day Sunday sitting around the house recovering :-)

For the next few weeks I'll probably be the only one posting because Angela is heading to Lake Quinault for a much deserved and greatly needed vacation.

--Abe

Outage

Sorry about the outage over the weekend. Our DNS service expired and I didn't get any sort of notification about it happening. Then, when it expired all the settings got wiped and I had to re-figure out how to set it up. Of course I set it up wrong the first time but it took 48 hours for the dns settings to work so I didn't find out till this morning. It's all good now though.

--Abe

Volcano pics

Check these out! Straight from Iceland. Those pictures are just amazing.

We're headed to Stumptown this weekend. Going to drive down to Portland in the morning and drive back that night. It's going to be a really long day but should be a lot of fun too.

I've been working on one of my stories a lot lately. I'm super happy with how it's coming along. So happy that I want to talk about it and tell everyone about it but instead I'm going to just get back to work on it. You all can read it when I'm done :-)

I thought that this interactive chart was very interesting. You don't often see this type of unemployment data broken down by metro area. According to that chart the number of people employed in the Seattle area has decreased an average of 4.63% per month for the last three months. That's just scary.

--Abe

Dino-Vamp - now in color

Fun weekend. We went to this month's Cartoonists Northwest meeting. They are very nice. The lead lady even recognized us from last month. This month, we listened to Michael Foster, who does a comic called "Larry's Cafe." It is fun and inspiring to hear about other people who are doing art.

I have been watching Arrested Development on the weekends, since I finished Law and Order: Criminal Intent. That show is really funny. I have been having a hard time drawing the last week, but I did draw The Creeper this weekend, which was last week's challenge on Ten Ton Studios. I think he turned out OK. Could be better, but that will just happen with practice. What I have been trying to get the energy to do for the last week is start the thumbnails of the Gardner story. We have most of a script. And I basically know how the ending goes. There are a few frames I know almost exactly what I hope they will look like. I need to do character sketches (a lot) of the two main characters.

Finally, here is a color version of the Dino-Vamp cartoon. This is my first real color job in Photoshop, so please forgive.

So this weekend, I also watched Superman Doomsday. I thought it was weird how much he tore up the city when it was completely unnecessary and in a real situation, some of his fighting tactics, like throwing a bad guy through a building so the whole thing collapses (at the end of a work day) would have killed a heck of a lot of people. At one point, he even has the option to move the fight to outside the city and brings it right back to the center. One thing though, I loved was how they animated Superman taking off for flight. I think that is exactly what it would look like and it was so graceful. Make me want to be able to fly. :)

I also watched The Devil's Own. That was pretty good. Not much to say about it though. The description on Netflix is terrible. Has hardly anything to do with the actual story.

And I watched The Sasquatch Gang, which was pretty funny. It has a very similar feel to Napoleon Dynamite, which makes sense, since it is the same director.

And finally, (this is actually in reverse order) I watched School Ties with a young Brendan Frasier and Matt Damon. Matt Damon was not famous at the time and had a main role, but not the biggest role. I liked it, actually. I really like Brendan Frasier. He is usually really funny. This was not funny, but I think he did the part really well. I think he probably could have been a more serious actor if he wanted to, but he really seems to like making dumb comedies, which is not a bad thing in my opinion.

Here are some comics I found recently:

• The Intrepid GirlBot - So far, I like it a lot. It is very cute. Along the lines of Abominable Charles Christopher, it seems to me. Just in orange instead of blue and a girl bot instead of an abominable snowman.
• Gunnerkrigg Court - I love this one. I think it is in print too, but I have to save my money, so I can only read it online for now. Though perhaps I will buy a commission or something. I might start doing that. I was thinking of starting a collection of different characters knitting. :)
• Love me nice - Hilarious. What a funny idea for a comic.
• Heropotamus - I haven't read too far in this, just the new posts for a week or two, but it seems pretty funny. Light hearted. So far.

Don't these look like fun?! Too pricey for me right now, but maybe some time in the future.

Funny and terrifying

This out http://crackshackormansion.com/ It seems that Vancouver Canada has been having a little real estate bubble. I thought the crappy run down houses with asking prices in the 300Ks in Seattle were ridiculous!

--Abe

this is awesome

Take a look at this. That's just crazy!

--Abe

Whoops

Well, this weekend was fun. We went to greek and mom and I split the Rack of Lamb again, which is always amazingly good. But I never have clean dishes at the restaurant we went to. Oh well.

This weekend my mom also showed me how to color my comics in photoshop. And I went, "Duh. You should me that last time I was here. I will remember this time." And I did. I have started on coloring the Dino-Vamp. I will post it when I am done. But that will probably be next week. Might have been today had I not been totally distracted by Corgis on You Tube. I looked up Talking Corgis and found this:

That was so funny. Then we finally hooked up the Web cam and started recording the corgis. Not a very good camcorder, but better than none.

Also, our dogs totally do some of that. Nisa also does a funny little growl while she stands up next to Abe. Here is a quick little video of me making Nisa sit up and lay down. You can see how bad Abe's camera work is. And that Nisa moves far too fast for the camera. Watch her tail, too. Very funny.

Monday blah

I got busy writing and doing things around the house and forgot to post. We went to Bellingham this weekend to celebrate Isaacs birthday. It was fun.

Also, Anita helped us to take the inks of "Harrowing tales at the Bus Stop" and turn them into a book. She also printed up like four copies for us. We gave one to her and Jim and one to Isaac and kept the other two for ourselves. It looks fantastic! It was really fun to see her work. I'm so thankful for her help. She made it look so professional. I'm also super proud of Angela :-)

Take a look at this article on zerohedge. It's an analysis of the costs of living in america right now. Interesting reading. Last month 6900 people filed for bankruptcy every day. That's more people than in the depths post-crash madness back in March.

--Abe

A little news for you

Kyrgyzstan is burning. News at elev-- Oh yeah the US media doesn't seem to be covering this. The single reference to it on cnn.coms front page is "Troubled Kyrgyzstan vital to US" which refers to the fact that a very important air base is located there. The lone picture in the article is of a woman kissing a baby.

--Abe

I'm boring

I just can't think of anything to talk about today. I had the same problem on Monday. I started researching something, got distracted, forgot to post and then forgot what I had been researching. Angela made fun of me when I told her.

Yeah, Alice was pretty average. It looked ok but the story was kinda meh. There were big stretches of "Hey look at how cool our CGI is" that added nothing to the movie at all.

I read a number of financial blogs. I used to read them daily but they started really depressing me so I'm down to a few times a week. Ah! I remembered what I was researching! I found this article on RollingStone. I'm pretty confident that if that doesn't make you angry as hell you're either a banker or so out-of-touch that you don't even understand what you've read.

--Abe

Margarita time

This past Sunday was my mom's birthday and we met in Burlington for a movie and lunch with my Aunt Carol, too. We went to the Cascade mall theater and Alice in Wonderland started 20 minutes late. Annoying. The movie was good, but not as good as I expected. I think part of it was the theater. The film seemed darker than it maybe should have been and the sound was pretty quite. It also should have been way longer. I think they cut a lot out. I think the white Queen needed more explanation because there were hints that she had more story but they never got around to telling it. Bummer.

Then we went to El Cazador for lunch. Abe and I had delicious Taquitos. And for dessert, mom bought us all a plate of Xangos to share, which is cheese cake wrapped in a flour tortilla and then deep fried. Sounded gross, but it tasted really good. It was an appropriate place for lunch because for her birthday, I made mom the Frozen Margarita socks. Those were terrible to make, but she seems to like them, so they were worth it. I got done with the first one and couldn't bring myself to make the second one. Mostly because of the annoying cactus on the ankle. And then to top it all off, when I finally did it. I put the cactus on the same side of both ankles so now she has two left socks. Agh. I put it off so long that Friday night we stayed up until almost 1 so I could try to finish the socks, but I ended up finishing them in the car on the way up to the movie instead.

The top of the sock is supposed to look like the salt rim of the glass. Haha. That was probably the most fun part. So before I gave them to mom, I asked her if she planned on having a Margarita, and she didn't so I was a little disappointed. But she thought the socks were so funny when she opened them that she showed them to the waitress and asked for a matching margarita. And I was too dumb to get a picture of that. :( But she is wearing them today, so I guess she must like them. And that makes three items off my list, though I also added one (Slip Jig socks from Rockin' Sock Club).

This weekend, I also finished the pencils for the bus stop story and started inking. The cover and first page are basically done. I need to add some white gauche to the first page, but that will be quick (I hope I don't completely mess it up).

Also this weekend, I got through all the Criminal Intent available for streaming, which was season 6. I started watching Rescue Me. That show is kind of depressing though (yeah, I know I just finished 6 years of Criminal Intent, a show about the worst or most complicated crimes).

Abe just informed me about a doggly adventure in jerkiness. He came out from wherever he was and found the dogs sitting all happy together on the couch with a pillow between them. On closer inspection there was a hole in that pillow which led to a hole in the actual pillow from which they dogs had been gleefully removing the stuffing. Other than the two holes, the outer one of which had already been there, the thing is fine. It is an old pillow from my grandma when I was in grade school or so. One side is Xmas and the other is little bo peep. Jerks.

In other news, it is so cold in our apartment, that in addition to my traditional PJ work outfit for Work-At-Home-Tuesday, I also have on my 'house sweater,' hat, fingerless mittens, scarf, blanket around my legs, socks, and slippers and I am still cold.

Thursday thursday thursday

I don't have much to talk about at the moment. I'm having a hard time keeping up with the news because it just seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket and it just depresses me to know the details.

I'm pretty burned out on video games as well. I've been spending my free time reading. In the last week I've read books IV and V in the Dark Tower series, a graphic novel called Black Summer and I've started re-reading The Stand. I'm in a real Stephen King phase I guess.

I'm looking forward to watching more Lost this weekend with Angela.

--Abe

Uh, wow, just wow.