Art and Alliteration in the Land of Tomorrow @sparksel - Tumblr Blog

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janmisali

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

4 or 5

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 6 days 10 hours

characterdesignreferences

Art by Boell Oyino

May’s Theme: #TravellingBeekeeper

Presented by IDEA Academy

Discover the artists of the Character Design Challenge community and the current Theme of the Month in our Facebook Group! And when you repost your design on our Patreon page, you can also win awesome prizes every month and choose the future themes!

RULES | WINNERS | PRIZES | COURSES

softlyfiercely

i love how weird kids are. they make up the most bizarre stuff when left to their own devices and it's never what an adult would naively predict a kid would do in their imaginative play

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

10/10 no notes. kids are amazing

bread-in-the-void

um?

noctude

your online pets are worried about Y2K

orpheuslament

losing it

bombing

no your honor I absolutely can make my case like an adult. first things first, fuck the defendant and fuck his family too. secondly,

bythestardoggedmoon

thecrumbez

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

erratic-dragon-fruit

out of the tags with you

qadmonster

Ko-fi dooble

“Bivalve False-Seraphim/Demon“

Consider supporting me on ko-fi and get your own monster dooble!

marcheriest

Tableau of character commissions and some patreon requests from over the years.

Character design credit is located in the alt text. I simply drew them all!

pocketss

Ummm she's literally sensitive :/

sam-keeper

Hey Look At This Comic: Hilda the 13th

I picked up Mellodillo's gag strip Hilda the 13th recently and basically from the jump I've been trying to figure out a good way to highlight it that isn't just me saying "waow cartooning good". cause the cartooning's real good! expressive and gestural but still really clear, with great sense of strip-based pacing and joke development. it might not update daily but it's exactly the kind of thing that draws me to a daily strip. Oh, and I'm really enjoying the development of the urban fantasy sapphic and witchy setting and its many quirks. Like the appearance of Hilda's mother trapped in her blocky desktop computer:

This specific strip was actually perfect for me, cause it's got such an elegant command of its space and composition. I don't think it comes across as very flashy, but it's the kind of understated control that really impresses me.

Look at the way the "camera" in the scene gradually rotates through the three panels. We start with a head on view, with each character in order of their speech bubbles. Pretty straightforward. The next panel is at something like a 3/4 view (more like 30 degrees or something ,but who's counting). This allows us to focus in getting more detail on Hilda and her mom's expressions. It's a panel where just the two of them have dialogue, so retaining the same shot composition wouldn't make a lot of sense, right? I also just like the shot. It introduces some dynamism to what another strip cartoonist might simplify to a flat composition because that's a bit easier. (If you recall I was similarly wowed by the dynamic compositions in Ted Shearer's Quincy.) Having Hilda at an angle here emphasizes her defensive posture and expression of irritation (and, I'd read, a guilty conscience). And it creates the impression of Mrs G turning to berate Hilda despite the fact that she is, remember, a flat image on a bulky computer screen! There's some real utility in the composition choices.

By the last panel Mellodillo's transitioned us cleanly a full 90 degrees from the first angle, allowing them to once again effectively line the characters up for their dialogue, with Hilda's mom moved to the left so she can more easily set up the punchline exchange. I like that here there's a bit of a zig zag motion through the panel. It's not as straightforward as p1, but that works for me--Hilda's boxed in here by her critics on either side, after all, even if she gets the last word in. Imagine if the composition remained static throughout: the word balloons would have to criss-cross each other awkwardly to accommodate the backward speaking order between Mrs G and Hilda's covenmate Cole. I guess Hilda positioned on the right would more conventionally fit her being the punchline-deliverer but I think the tradeoff to a consistent, static composition adds little and loses lots.

None of this is the kind of flashy weird paneling I tend to highlight, but that's all the more reason for me to do so, I think. It's just good solid technique that's notable precisely because it's meant to work below our direct awareness. Which I suppose makes this a bit like explaining the magic trick, but how else are you going to learn how to cast spells?

I write extremely variable length reviews of comics under my Hey Look At This Comic tag here, and also on my website, so please follow for more talk about comics off the beaten path. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.

juliedillon

A watercolor painting of a swimmer encoutering some sapphic mermaids, edited slightly for tumblr. (The titty-out version is over on my bluesky at juliedillon.bsky.social )