Today’s Heifer International fundraising watercolor is a literary hare!
Writing her memoirs, no doubt! An entire chapter is dedicated to yesterday’s fox and what a doofus he is. Also what sell-outs bunnies are.
This one sold instantly (wow dang), but there will be more on the way this week! If you have a request for a particularly fun animal you’d like to see me do, post it in comments and I’ll throw it into the hat.
And, just to start keeping records, Animals For Animals has now raised $80. That’s enough for four rabbits or half of a llama!
People have started asking if I’ll produce prints of the animals for sale. The answer is yes, but I want to encourage sales of originals before I start selling reproductions (although I would like for proceeds from print sales to go to Heifer as well).
Stay tuned!
Every year I try to make a Christmas donation to my favorite charity – Heifer International, a wonderful organization that purchases animals (from bees to buffalo)as well as veterinary care and training for impoverished families the world over. (Read more on their site.)
This year it’s a bit harder for me to donate than usual, since I’ve made the transition to being a self-supporting artist. Many of the friends with whom I used to go in on an animal purchase are in the same financial situation.
It seemed to me that this was an opportunity – for me to make things, for you to purchase something lasting, and for a family in the larger world to benefit from it! For the month of December, I will be creating and then selling watercolor paintings of animals (as often as I can manage!). When I finish, I’ll count up what’s been raised and then buy the most animal possible!
My offering today: an enemy of many of the animals Heifer sponsors, a fox! Little does he realize that his dastardly deeds will ultimately be doing good.
This craft fellow is on sale at Etsy for $40. It is a lovely little painting, and I will guarantee arrival by mail to any part of the world in time for Christmas, and that it will be packaged fancy-like.
Finishing the website and putting together a book pitch have delayed me for another week. But that’s okay, because it gives me the opportunity to make some long overdue fan-art for the best ever webcomic set in Ancient Rome: SPQR Blues by Klio!
Yessir, that’s Vesuvius in the background. The volcano is to SPQR Blues what werewolves are to Family Man: you never know when it’s going to kick in.
SPQR Blues, beyond being a great ensemble soap opera, is also one of those rare works of historical fiction that make the time and place it depicts feel both cozily familiar…and completely foreign.
Klio’s delicate and conservative linework can be consumed in large doses with no dangerous side effects, and the obstacles and heartbreaks of daily life in a complicated society make for very tasty reading as well.
There’s an immense archive available for your reading pleasure, so shoo! Go read!
Soon we’ll back to regular updates and I’ll roll out the new website, but in the meantime, here’s our third week of art devoted to some of my favorite comics online. This week we move away from longform narrative comics and head for strip land, with Arthur (duck) and Flaco (lizard) from Dave Kellett’s Sheldon.
There are many strips online that I enjoy deeply, but Sheldon is the only one that makes me feel like I’m a little kid again, pressing my nose with delight against the daily newsprint funnies while I wolf down a bowl of Rice Chex before school. Calvin & Hobbes was a strip at the time which, even if I didn’t get every joke, was so exuberant that I loved every panel. I think 9 year-old me would’ve felt the same way about Sheldon.
As it is, 26 year-old me happily returns to Sheldon every day, snerking at the obscure “grown-up” or pop culture jokes and quietly enjoying the sheer silliness of it all.
Dave Kellett is also a bonafide funnybook scholar and a stand-up fella. Bless the internet for bringing him to us in this day and age!
I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work. To heck with that! If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.
At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).
So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction. Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.
This week: Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.
What a wonderful character design! That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character. (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!) I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.
I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing. It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive. A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.