I’m finally getting around to reading Digger, and not really enjoying it much, to tell you the truth. But I’m still fairly near the beginning (just started Chapter 2), and maybe it gets better later on. Anyway, I’m trying to figure something out. Could someone tell me what’s going on in this panel here?

Here’s the whole page. I get what’s going on before and after that panel, the action of the page in general. But I can’t figure that one panel out. Here are the possible readings I’ve come up with:

1. Digger is moving her left hand (the one not holding the pickaxe) horizontally for some reason. For a moment I thought maybe she was pulling a cover off of the pickaxe head, but the thing I thought might’ve been the cover I now think is just part of her vest. I can’t think of any other reason for her to be swinging her arm like that; she winds up with her hand behind her, which makes it less effective for the move she makes in the next panel.
2. Digger is swinging her pickaxe back and forth. (The speed lines continue past the pickaxe on either side, so it would have to be a back-and-forth motion.) Seems plausible, but her right arm doesn’t seem positioned plausibly for the full extension that would be necessary for the head of the pickaxe to follow that arc. And this still doesn’t explain why her left arm is behind her.
3. Digger just threw the pickaxe from her left hand (where we see it in the first panel) to her right. This connects the first and fourth panels, and accounts for the pickaxe moving from one hand to the other, but again, it’s weak as a prelude to the action in panel five (she’s using both hands for the pickaxe anyway; why waste time and risk dropping it to switch hands?). Also, the speedlines depict an arc of horizontal movement; a thrown pickaxe would have to arc vertically. And this reading doesn’t explain why the speedlines are continuing past the head of the pickaxe.

Also, when does the actual story start? Like I said, just started Chapter 2, maybe 70 or 80 pages in, and the characters are still just wandering around chatting. I’m thinking Ursula Vernon would have benefited from the discipline of publishing in pamphlet form. Cerebus started out crude, but that first 22-page issue contained a full story.

So, November since I’ve posted any sketches. Turns out that five months is long enough for my scanner to acquire a layer of dust thick enough that I have to blow it off before using it.

This is all stuff doodled in local coffee shops — Ozzie’s on Lincoln and Seventh, and Tea Lounge on Union.

No, wait, I just remembered: The three heads at the top of this post were drawn while I was sitting on a park bench on Plaza Street, opposite the Montauk Club.

Back on the art horse. Straight copy from this portrait I found on someone’s Flickr account. There’s a bigger image behind the cut tag.

( Scary-looking old dude, at 600x600 pixels! )

This is pretty much all Pitt black and grayscale artist markers; initially the new “big” size, and then the old smaller size for details. I seem to just be using the three “warm” grays, mostly because the lightest gray in their range is one of the warms. But comparing them, there’s a pretty big leap in value between the light and middle warm grays, so I may have to start sticking the lightest cool gray in there to moderate things. Or maybe start working with ink wash.

For the whiskers, I tried using some Liquitex titanium white acrylic ink (or “ink!” — the label actually has the exclamation mark) and a dip pen (Speedball Hunt 56), but that came out all thin and watery. Maybe next time I’ll try dipping deeper into the bottle. But anyway, instead, I tried my trusty Sakura Gelly Roll white pen, and it performed like a champ. Seriously, I got a much more opaque white than I’m used to getting with this pen.

The paper is a page from a Flexi-Sketch sketchbook, the 6-by-8-inch one. These are made (or at least distributed) by Global Art, the same people who do those great hand•book travel journals.

For those of you who don’t read Making Light, I just posted the sketchnotes I took at Worldcon. Here’s the background, and here are the sketchnotes on Flickr.

More doodling in that pocket Winsor-Newton. I’m using Inktense pencils for the colors, and mostly they make me want to try real watercolors again. Well, that and seeing Enrico Casarosa work on the cover to his new book. And the juicy colors in this cute little Miyazaki sketch of an island.

For people who were wondering about the relative weights of computers at Games-Club-in-Exile last night:

I think mnemex’s new laptop was a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which starts at 2.7 pounds. If it’s the largest model, it’s got a 13.3” display (1440x900?), but I can’t tell how much that particular model weighs.

According to Wikipedia, the XO-1 weighs either 1.45 or 1.58 kilograms, depending on which battery option you choose. Call it around 3 pounds, so yeah, it might be a bit heavier than the Lenovo.

The ASUS Eee weighs about 2 pounds. If I were gonna get a lightweight, toting-about computer, this would probably be it.

The MacBook Air weighs 3 pounds and also has a 13.3” display (1280x800).

Update: Oh, right, and the thing I was trying to look up? Mike Rohde’s SXSW sketchnotes.

More than a month since I posted any sketches here. Crap.

I watched a video Danny Gregory made, and figured out a bit of what I’d been doing wrong in watercolors. See, those nylon waterbrushes? They kinda suck for scraping paint off the watercolor pans and plopping it onto the palettes. Which means I’d been just pulling color off the pans and painting it right on the paper, which works okay for small regions of pure color, but crappy for mixing or covering large regions.

I picked up one of those Cotman portable brushes on sale at Pearl a while back, and a folding water container at Hudson County Art Supply, and today I tried using the waterbrush just as a clean water source, dripping it down onto the pans and palettes, and using the Cotman to grab color and paint, and mixed up batches of color on my palette, and it worked pretty well. This is a guy who was sitting near at the next table in the coffee shop. I’ve still got a lot of practicing ahead of me, but I can see a way forward. And now I’m psyched to try some watercolor techniques with acrylics.