This was an actual text exchange with my sister, cartoonified with permission in my best imitation of Dykes to Watch Out For. I used to do a lot of hatching and stippling (see this 12-year-old comic on the website I never update) because "that's what indie comix look like." I started playing with watercolor and in...
2024-01-30 04:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons,
This cartoon went in the theater's e-newsletter. It's the most personal newsletter cartoon I've done, and much longer than usual, but I couldn't think of anything else to write about. The first three weeks of January were pretty rough. I got COVID and we had to cancel one weekend of classes, 2 weekends of shows, 2 movie nights and 2 birthday parties, first due to snow and then to flooding from a sprinkler malfunction. Naomi and I were intensely lucky that we had power, heat,...
2024-01-27 02:09:14 +0000 UTC View Post
This is an intersection on my commute home. I took a photo at a red light in July and finally got around to drawing it. The theater is surrounded by much different buildings than the old location. I didn't think downtown could be fun to draw, but I was inspired by cartoonist and painter Mateusz Urbanowicz to give it a try. His watercolors of Tokyo are stunning and his YouTube process videos are really ...
2023-12-22 05:48:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
This first postcard took me two tries to lay out. This was my first attempt. (Excuse the poor picture quality; this is what I texted to Barry asking if it worked.)
Because action in comics usually goes left-to-right, Barry had thought that the techies were carrying things out of the building. I had to find a way to show that the mom and the guy carrying the pine tree were on a collis...
Happy Long Weekend of Eating Leftovers to those who celebrate! This year I'm thankful for getting going on this comic again.
Panel 1 was brought to you by the You Are Good podcast episode about "But I'm a Cheerleader." Of course there were hours of podcasts involved in drawing this page, but that's the one that pops into my head when I look at it. That episode is just warm fuzzies on top of warm fuzzies.
Thanks, as always, for the support on Patreon!
Becky
This is the first political cartoon I did entirely in Clip Studio Paint! It went up on Barry's Patreon a couple of months ago, but this post has been sitting half-finished in my Drafts. Coloring digitally is a lot faster and easier in Clip Studio Paint than in Photoshop. There are lots of neat drawing tools, too. I hope this will cut a bunch of production time off my political cartoons with Barry wi...
2023-11-06 19:19:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Welp, my day job is super cute lately. The October "Halloween Ball" was interactive and the audience was encouraged to show up in costume. This sometimes meant full-family Mario or Star Wars costumes and, in one case, a family of 3 different David Bowies at their toddler's request!
Dress-up was optional for the Box Office, so I took the option! (Photo on the left by Emily Siskin THANKS FOR THE DOWNTOWN COFFEE-LUNCH EMILY)
2023-11-02 19:10:04 +0000 UTC
View Post
Moving has certainly been a theme of the past year! The children's theater spent last August/September moving out of the old building, then we worked out of storage units and satellite locations for 4 months, then we moved into the new building and had our first shows, classes, and camps. Then, as I was working on this postcard, Naomi and I found a new place to live! Thus began another round of boxes, packing tape, rental vans, and trying to remember which box you left that important thingie ...
2023-09-14 18:42:45 +0000 UTC View Post
True story, the theater was right between a parking lot and WasabiCon last weekend, so the people-watching was unmatched! Naomi helped me pick out which cosplayers to draw since I'm not as familiar with popular anime characters. The baby Pikachu/Ash Ketchum pairing was a happy accident. The parent was originally just a dad in a baseball cap, but halfway through inking it, I thought it would be cute if he was cosplaying, too. I did need to google "anime character with baseball cap," a...
2023-08-03 16:51:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's the source for panel 4 if you're curious.
My soundtrack for this comic was the audiobook of If Tomorrow Doesn't Come. It's really good so far, although content warnings for suicidality, homophobia, and college students who weren't born yet when ...
2023-07-19 00:01:53 +0000 UTC View Post
These days, when I'm not at the children's theater (or recovering from summer camp chaos), I'm in full outdoorsy mode. Most of the time that just means taking the scenic route home from work, but a couple weeks ago Naomi and I did a 3-night camping trip in the Columbia River Gorge. We took the light rail through the suburbs of Portland and then biked 22 miles to the campsite.
It's customary to ...
2023-07-12 17:56:44 +0000 UTC View Post
I keep going back and forth between "I don't have enough postcards to warrant a whole Patreon post," "I'm too busy to post," and "oops I haven't posted in a couple weeks, so here's a bunch of postcards."
This one was from Spring Break Camp:
I'm starting to have postcards from the new building...
<...
Hi patrons!
I’m home from the Vancouver Comic Arts Fest, which feels like it warrants a Patreon post.
Naomi and I drove to Canada on Thursday...
...which gave us a free day before the convention.
We found a short hike that had good reviews...
...and I got to cross something of...
2023-05-26 03:00:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I promised some details about this double-page spread!
Barry got the idea from a cartoonist named Gianni de Luca.
This Romeo & Juliet comic consisted of detailed backgrounds that often encompassed two pages. The characters appear multiple times, traversin...
2023-05-15 02:11:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
This page was brought to you by reference photos, old shoes, and Barry's copy of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.
Let's just say I wasn't happy with my first couple of passes at this page.
Note to self, reference photos are the best. I'm bad about throwing away old shoes, so I had a pair of tall lace-up boots and some heels in the back of my closet. Taking photos in th...
2023-05-05 18:06:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Is everyone caught up on Abbott Elementary? HOW ABOUT THAT SEASON 2 FINALE?! That show is my current happy place.
I started drawing these over the past couple of months when I need a no-pressure, no-planning drawing activity. There are a ton of great faces on this show, and fortunately, lots of Tumblr fans to screenshot them.
2023-04-29 03:45:27 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi patrons!
It's not a superhero comic without a chase scene through an alley, right? (Right? I'm not as familiar with superhero comics.)
I had some fortunate timing while I was working on this page. A friend of mine invited me to an antique mall in an old movie theater in a suburban downtown...
I got impatient with shopping well before they did, so I went outside and photographed t...
2023-04-22 04:32:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
There will be a couple of word balloons on this spread, but I wanted to post this as soon as the art was done, cause I'm excited.
This took more than one audiobook's worth of time to draw, but the book that comes to mind when I look at this page is "Small Game" by Blair Braverman. It's about someone who joins a wilderness survival reality show to get a life-changing cash prize, and then everything goes wrong. I think Blair described it as being about "survival and also...
2023-04-05 18:15:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
In just over a month, the children's theater will open a show in its new location! It's starting to look done...
...especially after a late night of painting by staff and volunteers.
2023-03-15 18:37:20 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi patrons,
While I work on a double-page SuperButch spread (and try not to lose entire days finding cool but off-topic photos on Shorpy) I've also been doodling in my sketchbook. I've been using Handbook sketchbooks since my cruise ship days because they're a comfy size and h...
2023-02-28 06:31:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Drawing a multi-panel physical gag felt new to me.
Does it count as slapstick when everyone narrowly avoids bumping into anything? The poses were really fun, but drawing the exact same background four times was a combination of boring and stressful. I copy-pasted the digital pencils, and it still felt hard to draw the panels consistently. I ended up inking the background in 15-minute increment...
2023-02-09 07:21:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Naomi called it.
Anyway, Hi there! I just realized I haven't shown you these postcards yet. I've been "about to finish the SuperButch page" for so long that it slipped my mind.
2023-02-07 06:44:44 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi patrons,
Happy New Year! I hope you had some holiday fun. I basically fulfilled my promise not to work (minus one newsletter cartoon for the theater). But I ended up doing a lot more sketching than expected, so I'm posting those here!
This page references the theater's Winter Break Camps. My job included setup, check-in, and admin work. School break camps are a lot of fun, but I have mixed feelings about starting work at 8am (as opposed to 10:30 or 1pm, my usual shifts).
...
2023-01-02 21:00:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Barry is one of those valuable script writers who aids in the search for reference photos! He included this peanut vendor in the script.
I had fun looking at old hand-painted signs and feeling way inadequate because those signs had so many fun fonts and such cool brushwork. I hope I got the idea across with the "Don't forget to vote" si...
2022-12-22 05:32:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Barry and I had an "oh shit" moment on the previous page. Remember when Captain Turtle was trying to start the motor on his shell backpack? The script originally had a caption about Captain Turtle looking for a clear path between the power lines and telephone wires. But I realized I'd been drawing the street with zero wires for several pages, and it would have been hard to go back and add in a bunch of telephone poles. So Barry needed to find another way to delay Captain Turtle's flight. I ma...
2022-12-11 04:41:03 +0000 UTC View Post
True story from Wizard School, cartooned with the parent's permission! The theater's Fall Break Camp involved a lot of role playing--the campers decorated their own magic wands and solved a mystery together--and apparently one kid made an off-recipe potion at home.
I got to break out my most exciting find from the Costume Sale!
How often do you get to wear a dress like this?! (Not picture...
2022-12-02 17:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
The new venue for the children's theater is still under construction. Apparently the construction crew is tickled by the unique job!
One awkward thing about doing journal comics is that drawing can take awhile. You end up drawing a stress dream about summer camp while you're getting ready for Halloween!
2022-11-28 17:00:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi patrons!
Off the subject, while I was drawing this page, I was listening to an audiobook called "The Facemaker: a visionary surgeon's battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War I." So now when I lo...
2022-11-19 22:32:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
Fun fact: Lillian was hopping onto public transit next to cute children up to 5 years before Eddie Valiant became famous for it in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Also fun: I feel like I'm working back up to weekly SuperButch pages!
(If you're not as online as me, here's a quick explainer for th...
2022-10-26 18:03:28 +0000 UTC View PostRemember this postcard from a few months ago, when I did some set painting?
I thought of it when I saw this exchange on Twitter:
2022-10-18 06:42:05 +0000 UTC
View Post