20 August 25
Material
The good folks at SAWgust have been providing prompts daily to get us thinking about our process. I’ve sometimes answered prompts but I’ve ALWAYS thought about them; they’re very interesting. Today’s was #material: what materials do we use and why? I decided to draw it on one of my materials that isn’t pictured here (Procreate on my iPad). And it’s all from memory, since Winston was sprawled across the kitchen table where these materials all are.
Last night I had a call with Mr. Ginger’s owner, and hoo boy there is a lot more to this story. Good and bad. The good: Mister Ginger is still alive and well and living in Kharkiv (and he has a girlfriend); the bad: this has been traumatic for him, retelling this story for me. But A. did say that he thought Mr. Ginger helped him through some very hard times, which is great to hear because it’s the actual punchline — simply giving comfort to people in a war zone is heroic enough.
18 August 25
Matching the Medium to the Message
On Saturday I attended the SAWgust halfway point call. I had a question about how others organized their composition process if the final was going to be analog; mostly I work on paper then go digital. But for this Ukraine project it seems analog is a good way to go.
I’d done some sketches with a fountain pen but it has a fine nib and when reduced down it maybe too fine a line. I looked for and found my Sailor Fude pen, a fountain pen with a bent nib that can give you at least three different thicknesses. I think I can get this to work. I still have some fine-tuning to do but am pretty set on this course.
Someone said they just redrew and redrew panels until they were right. Someone else said when using watercolor they used a camera rather than a scanner. Another helpful suggestion was to write the names of the materials, paints, brushes and pens on the back of the work so if you revisit it a year later you have some hope of matching it.
Meanwhile it’s looking like I might do the whole section before the invasion in full color, moving to monochrome afterwards except for the guinea pig… The paper is Deleter A Comic Book Paper size B5, which is not as thick as Bristol board, takes a good wash, and is very pen-friendly.
16 August 25
Almost a Real Guinea Pig
I’ve now completed a very incomplete first draft of the script for my Mister Ginger comic. There will need to be quite a bit of work on the script and also on the drawings… but to help with the latter, I ordered a plushie, pictured at left, and set about doing some sketches.
Drawing live guinea pigs is obviously better, but a) I don’t have one, b) if I did, the cats would kill it, c) if I go to the pet store, the animals are almost at ground level which makes it hard to get anything other than a bird’s eye view. So this plushie, while not perfect, at least allows me the luxury of placing at eye level and even higher, this way and that, 3/4 view and from behind. I am still drawing on reference photos but this will allow me to stage the drawings in my comic better.
14 August 25
Designing a Cape for a Guinea Pig
The Ukrainian coat of arms features a trident (“tryzub)”) that dates at least as far back as King Volodymyr (980-1015). It was redesigned following Ukraine’s independence in 1991: gold on a blue ground, as in this Ukrposhta stamp “The first anniversary of the independence of Ukraine. State Coat of Arms and State Flag of Ukraine.”
Working on my Mister Ginger comic has given me a lot to think about, particularly this prompt: “how does your character see themselves? how do others see them?” and it occurs to me that this guinea pig thinks he’s a hero, where the people around him see him as a lovable, cuddly pet. But if he gets a cape… even if it’s only a bandana, what does that change?
I am still very much in the beginning stages of all this but am pondering what defines a “hero,” what is “heroic,” and whether simply giving comfort to people in a war zone counts. I think maybe it does.
6 August 25
Guinea Pig Studies
I’m working on a new comic, one that features a guinea pig that had some big adventures during the Russian advance on Kyiv in February 2022. (Since this is based on a true story, I’d like to make the guinea pig at least somewhat recognizable!) We owned a couple of guinea pigs as kids but that was a long time ago plus neither was the smooth-haired variety like Mister Ginger, so I’ve been doing some online image research (anatomy, though there is precious little available about musculature) and different poses, including some video I took at a PetSmart in Brunswick, Maine on Monday.
Getting the guinea pig to look “right” as a somewhat drawn-from-life animal is essential before I can turn this into the plucky heroic character of my story, and today was a bit of a test to see how far I’ve come. The ears are completely eluding me: you don’t want them upright (too much like a capybara), you don’t want them small (too much like a rat), you don’t want them big (too much like a chinchilla) and in fact in many photos of guinea pigs you hardly see them at all. It’s definitely back to the drawing board tomorrow, but I thought I’d share some progress sketches… There is a new PetSmart in town that might have some live guinea pigs, which would be a great place to start.
25 July 25
Travel Comics
I’ve been participating in the Friday Night Comics workshops offered by the “Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW)” for some time, though I’ve missed the past few. Tonight we were invited to make a page of a travel comic, led by Corinne Newbegin. I chose my recent trip to the East Coast to visit my now 92-year-old mother and spend a couple of days with my birding friend Linda. I have missed spring migration on the east coast for many of my trips there, and this was a great opportunity to address that.
Wistful, though. Would I ever see mum again? I hope so. I’m going back on Tuesday, leaving Numenius in charge of the cats.
15 June 25
Drawing the Erasure of Memory
History is, famously, written by the victors. When the victors are long-lived autocrats, the omissions scream across the generations: the state apparatus of information control and terror silence any dissent. In the case of Spain, the horrors of a prolonged civil war on the very eve of World War II made the suffering worse, because powers that might have been prevailed upon to help at least with food aid were already concerned with fighting a determined aggressor and protecting their own populations.
I grew up just to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s, a mere 5 miles away from Franco’s palace in El Pardo. His motorcade was a familiar traffic inconvenience. As foreigners we were unaware of the questioning and torture of prisoners in the now-infamous cuarteles of the Guardia Civil. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Silence.
I tried to capture some of this in a six-page comic that was published in an anthology last year. I’m grateful for the work of Hillary Chute, author of Disaster Drawn, for giving me the idea for this comic. As we were reminded by the recent viewing of Good Night, and Good Luck and are reminded daily by an administration slouching towards tyranny, the time for the courage to speak up is NOW.
