The building that housed the theater used to be a Christian Science church, built around 1916. Over the years, it had housed a Christian Science Church, a community center, offices, and a soup kitchen, and we could tell it was TIRED. Every time the color copier blew a fuse or something, we'd pat the walls and say "Just hang on through summer camp! Just another month!"
We finally got to see my d...
2022-10-12 16:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Whew! It's good to be back. September included a week-long visit from my parents and the children's theater moving out of its home of 30 years, so I was away from my drawing desk a lot. The theater also had a public farewell-event that involved me leading a parade from the old building to the new one, toting a bluetooth speaker on a bicycle trailer while wearing the Dormouse costume from our Alice in Wonderland production:
2022-10-07 01:27:54 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons,
I'm not throwing Barry under the bus for writing some SuperButch panels with weird perspective that kicked my butt (I totally am), but the SuperButch page is still halfway done. On the bright side, there will be a cool Patreon post about how Naomi saved the day with computer know-how!
In the meantime, here are some photos and postcards from bike-camping:
2022-09-02 02:24:18 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons,
I don't know if you're familiar with Falsettos, but it's an 80s/90s gay Jewish musical for musical-lovers, and our advanced theater teens did an unbelievable job with their performance (as did the directors)!
To be honest, it was a little surreal to watch the show performed by high schoolers and lauded by parents and classmates, after so much recent news coverage about anti-LGBTQIAanything school board panics and book bannings.
2022-07-27 01:39:48 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons,
Guess what, my coworker at the theater comes back from maternity leave this week! I'm really looking forward to splitting the work week with her again, instead of squeezing in draw-times around a full-time job. (I know lots of artists do that for years on end. My hat is off to them. It is dingdanged exhausting.)
I have enjoyed getting to work in new corners of the theater over the last few months. I finally finished these postcards about it:
2022-07-04 01:02:08 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons!
One contradiction of "watercolor journal comics" is that they sometimes take long enough that by the time I'm ready to post them, the thing happened a month or two ago.
This comic had some slightly painstaking digital fixes. I was originally smiling when I said "It's too late for me, but I can still help." After drawing it that way, I realized I wanted a more serious expression. So I drew a different mouth-line in pen, and used the stamp tool in Photoshop to cover the ...
2022-06-24 05:54:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
Here's the Issue Six Cover!
I was a little intimidated about doing the Jackie Ormes sketch using old-school nib pens, especially while trying to imitate a cartoonist who was well-versed with that tool.
Also, I felt like I'd been in the middle of this cover for so long, it was some kind of crime against Art if it doesn't look better than I can possibly draw it, which obv...
2022-06-13 00:02:50 +0000 UTC View Post
One more post from the theater. This was by far the largest hand-lettering job I've ever done!
Our master carpenter Paul let me pick out a few fonts for signage in the set. Here's a sheet with all the fonts I considered for the late-1940s train station and "The Club."
(The candy on my desk is from Roger, who turned a can of Almond Roca into a vintage can of coffee.)<...
2022-05-14 19:06:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
I admit it. I ran out of time. I won’t get this cover done before I go out of town. ::sigh:: It felt kind of freeing to say it.
Since this is a “Jackie Ormes drawing” of Lillian and Captain Turtle, I’m going to use a fountain pen and do lots of cross-hatching and stippling. I’m excited to play around with different tools than usual (and to take some time to experiment, instead of trying to crank the illustration ASAP).
This was my day today:<...
2022-05-14 06:37:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
We did it! We pulled off the Costume Sale. It took everyone several hours to move all the costumes out from storage onto the floor:
At one point Production needed to use all the dollies, so we got creative:
Look at this wonderland!
2022-05-10 20:56:50 +0000 UTC
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Hey patrons,
It's my second-to-last week of costume sale + set painting + box office + taking the occasional phone call about summer camps! I'm handling it very well.
Progress is being made on the costume sale! ...This looks more organized than last week, doesn't it? DOESN'T IT?!?
<... 2022-04-30 05:04:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
This month has been a doozy. I wish I was unveiling a shiny new SuperButch Issue 6 cover, but I'm in a cycle of "This week is unusually busy, but next week maybe isn't." Also, COVID slowly worked its way through my entire multi-housemated house, despite our isolating, wearing masks in the common spaces, eating in our rooms, and everything else we could think of. We got relatively lucky in terms of symptoms, knock on wood, but wow that was exhausting.
The theater teens ...
2022-04-23 18:24:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
I'm organizing a costume sale for the theater, now that we've reorganized and culled a bit. So if you're in Portland, keep May 7-8 open! I'll let you know when we have details. We're also getting ready to sell tickets for two theater-teen shows and a professional show in the next couple months, so my brain is bouncing from March to June and back, with several stops in between.
In the meantime, spring break camp:
2022-03-29 17:38:16 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons,
This page wraps up Issue 6! (I guess you're ok with cliffhangers if you're reading SuperButch a page at a time, but if not...Blame Barry.)
I started this page by drawing four different backgrounds and asking Barry to choose one.
They were all based on buildings that I'd noticed around Portland, and then looked up on Google street view to draw. Here's a side-by-side of th...
2022-03-17 04:26:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
When I want to draw but don't feel like cartooning, I'll go through my Camera Uploads for a building to draw. This first postcard is a flower shop I saw over Thanksgiving, when I was visiting family in San Diego. (Southern California beats Portland in terms of interestingly-shaped buildings!) I noticed this store when we were walking to the post office. I didn't want to look like a giant tourist ri...
2022-03-07 18:59:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Here's a look at how this page came to completion.
The original script says:
PANEL 1
A shot of Turtle’s face as he yanks/brushes the sandwich away. He’s covered in mayo and mustard and a tomato slice is sticking to his forehead and bits of lettuce everywhere (or however you want to do it - the point is, he’s a mess.)
He no longer looks calm and civilized. He looks like he wants... 2022-03-01 20:07:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Everyone give Barry a hand for the expressive lettering! I thought he was just going to throw a word balloon around a generic "MMPH" until I opened the file this morning. Love it!
Lillian's truly an innovator, throwing food in the face of public figures decades before Anita Bryant's pie to the face... Now I want a sandwich.
Here's the latest postcard from the children's ...
2022-02-09 17:36:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons!
This page has a LOT of faces. I had to draw 8 different Captain Turtles doing essentially the same thing. Sometimes it's a challenge to keep a "talking head" page like this visually interesting. Fortunately, I found these screenshots I'd taken while scrolling Twitter last month. (I have a habit of taking screenshots of people I find drawable, usually from news shows. It comes in handy when I'm drawing a non-generic looking person for a political cartoon.)
2022-02-01 05:19:33 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons!
When we started making SuperButch I thought it would be a peek into the past when things were worse, instead of being relevant to current events. :(
Barry's so good at writing dialogue for jerks. I think it comes from his hours of arguing on the internet. XD Barry's script says:
Turtle is a genuinely mean thug - but he’s also a celebrity and an experienced public speaker, and he instantly switches into public speaker mode, calm, kindly, intelligent.. 2022-01-22 02:09:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons!
Here's a fun game: Can you spot the differences between the final panel of this page, and the firehouse scene on page 167? (Answers below)
In the meantime, here are two more postcards from the children's theater:
2022-01-14 21:28:09 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons!
The children's theater is still closed (except for classes), so I'm leaning into where it says "et cetera" and "as needed" in my job description. Earlier this month I helped relocate 264 tubs and 17 racks of costumes out of storage and into the theater. Later, I helped with sorting the costumes into "keep," "donate," and "toss out." (The costume shop manager made the decisions, and I did a lot of labeling, carrying, and rolling dollies out to the dumpster.)
2021-12-31 01:43:37 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons!
This is what the page is going to look like in print (Yes, Barry wrote two double-page spreads in a row):
Barry's script says "This is a double page spread, showing a building - it could be a firehouse, the Norse Hall, a church, almost any public-spirited or public building that would have a large hall of some sort." Barry is a great writer to work with on a comic! I love the ...
2021-12-21 22:04:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy December, everybody!
That first postcard is from the Showers Pass Warehouse Sale, an annual chance to acquire rain gear that's been discounted from "LOL" to "worthwhile splurge."
This is probably the last postcard with my rainbow helmet. I'd had it for almost 5 years, and then I dropped it down a stairwell at the theater, so... End of an era.
Here are some postcards from Fall ...
2021-12-01 21:27:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons! I'm about to leave town for Thanksgiving, so please expect a lot more behind-the-scenes information with the next page.
...omigosh, I love Barry's lettering and word balloons on this page...
Thanks, as always, for supporting me on Patreon!
Becky
Hi patrons! I can't even express how satisfying it is for me to see this page in person, so I hope you feel the same way!
This is what the ink wash looks like by itself:
For the last month, I've been picturing how cool it will look with the different color filters. For the last week, I've been excited for the time when I lasso the area that's supposed to be sepia, open the blue color adju...
2021-11-13 04:48:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons,
I finally figured out how to arrange a store, a church, a swing set, a bench, a Benson Bubbler, a gazebo, three protagonists, a cookout, and a double dutch game into a two-page spread! I'm so excited to start inking this! But first, I wanted to give you a sneak peek, and tell you about a couple of things I learned about while putting this page together.
The building with the cupola is modeled after the 2021-11-05 18:13:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Oh boy, this was one of those pages that surely shouldn't take long to draw. And yet. :-/
The Jansson building was inspired by this Volvo dealership I saw while biking on an errand. (I sent Barry the photo and asked what would be a good name for a Turtle City company, and he thought of naming it after Tove Jansson):
2021-10-12 01:58:02 +0000 UTC
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Hi patrons! The children's theater just finished our second week of Fall classes, so there's been plenty of inspiration for newsletter cartoons:
(I've been working there 9 years, so I thi...
2021-10-06 02:51:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
I just got done with two weeks of working extra hours at the children's theater, covering for a coworker's well-deserved break. I was mostly still working from home. But theater classes are starting up again, so I also biked around SE Portland to distribute flyers for our new location on SE Foster Rd!
SE Foster got a bike lane a couple years ago, so it was a super-pleasant job to go up and down the street, dropping off flyers and chatting with folks in the shops. Also,...
2021-09-20 18:57:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Do you like this format for sharing a bunch of postcards, or do you prefer them embedded in a long post, with a little intro for each one? These seemed pretty self-explanatory. Summer camps were super cute, but they're over. The heat wave was rough. I have an extremely low success rate with online shopping.
OOH! Also, I want to show off my housemate's homemade challah from last night:
2021-09-07 18:30:09 +0000 UTC
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