David Chelsea's Blog, page 14

This Week on Patreon: Rebecca’s Snow Angel Rough, And Mugg’s Lucid Dream

It has been a while since I posted any archived comics to my Patreon page, but this week I have a real treat– a pencil rough for a story featuring my superhero character Snow Angel, drawn by my daughter Rebecca. Rebecca, who had been the real-life model for Snow Angel, drew the story in her sketchbook while away at a music camp for two weeks one summer. I redrew the story with some changes, and it became the final story in the SNOW ANGEL collection published by Dark Horse last year.

In the story, Snow Angel feels unappreciated, and decides to quit being a superhero, only to be dragged inevitably back in. My final version pretty much follows Rebecca’s, with a few changes. The cartoon superhero Dangerous Guy, whose appearance on TV sparks a major plot point, looks much the same in both versions (by the way, the coloring in the final art is by the incomparable Jacob Mercy):

One of Rebecca’s cleverest ideas was that Snow Angel has a guardian normal kid. I changed the kid’s sex, and made him something of a roly-poly Campbell Kid:

However, I did add a few scenes, and considerably transformed the ending. If you are curious to compare the two versions, here’s a link to the Snow Angel collection that the final version of the story appears in:

Meanwhile, I have been plugging away at my continuing web comic about Reality TV, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In an installment posted a few weeks ago, Sandy, one of the contestants in the 24 Hour Comic reality show, has been hitting the schnapps a little TOO hard, and winds up in a fist fight with a video camera:

In this week’s installment, Mugg, who has been gobbling chocolate-covered espresso beans in an effort to stay awake for 24 hours, suspects that he may have fallen asleep and be having a dream:

Especially after THIS happens:

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? Makes It To One Hundred, plus Free Comic Book Day!

Pop your champagne corks! ARE YOU BEING WATCHED has reached triple digits! My continuing webcomic about Reality TV dropped its 100th and 101st pages this last week on Patreon. We’re at a crucial juncture in the story, a semi-flirtatious dialogue between our protagonist Mugg and his secret crush Mandy, who shocks Mugg with some inside dope:

David Chelsea is reading: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

Meanwhile, this coming weekend I’ll be making a rare public appearance- two of them, in fact! I’ll be signing copies of all my books and giving away copies of some of them this Saturday, May 5, as part of Free Comic Book Day, an annual event which takes place at comic shops across the country. With me will be Milan Erceg, the director of the documentary 24 Hour Comic, drumming up interest in the July 11 iTunes release of the film:

Milan Erceg

Milan and I will be at two shops on Saturday– from 11 AM to 1 PM we will be at Cosmic Monkey on 5335 NE Sandy Blvd, Portland, OR 97213. I have a history with Cosmic Monkey– I have actually drawn two 24 Hour Comics in their space, and I contributed a drawing to their wall of artist’s interpretations of what a cosmic monkey would look like:

At 1 PM Milan and I will hop in a car and drive over the bridge to I Like Comics, the leading store in Vancouver, Washington. My estimate, depending on travel time, is that we will be there from 2 to 4 PM in the afternoon:

David Chelsea and Milan Erceg at Free Comic Book Day

Saturday, May 5.

11 am-1 pm at Cosmic Monkey 5335 NE Sandy Blvd, Portland, OR 97213

2-4 pm at I Like Comics 1715 Broadway St, Vancouver, WA 98663

Come by and say hi!

This Week on Patreon: More Scribe Illos, And Mandy Makes A Gookie!

I have been keeping on keeping on with my Patreon page– this week, I posted two new pages of my continuing web comic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, as well as another 10 illustrations with commentary from my 1970s beginnings at Portland’s underground newspaper the Scribe. I went back to the archive at Multnomah County Library to photograph some images I had missed from the first year of the newspaper, including my very first piece published in the Scribe, this ad for a concert benefiting my alma mater, the Metropolitan Learning Center:

David Chelsea is watching: Moonlight

starring Mahershala Ali

The Scribe illustrations are part of a Patreon category I call The Secret Stash, non-comics material that my fans are not likely to have seen– decorated envelopes, sketchbook drawings, early performance flyers, and the like. Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon supporters at the $4.99 level and above.

In addition to posting on my Patreon page, I will be doing a slide lecture about the Scribe and my part in it on Friday, May 5 at the Oregon Film History Invitational, the third annual one day Oregon film history conference. The conference is designed to showcase the complexity and diversity of Oregon film history for educators, historians, and museum professionals. It is small in size, and designed to encourage interdisciplinary engagement, open ended conversation, and professional networking. What my presentation is doing there is a little hard to fathom, but I was invited, and I do WATCH a lot of films.

Meanwhile, on ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? a casual flirtation is going on between our romantic leads Mugg, who is a contestant in a Reality TV show centering around a 24 Hour Comic session, and Mandy, who is a production assistant. It all begins when Mandy asks to read Mugg’s comic, which tells the story of the comic up to this point:

Of course Mandy has to try to make that funny face which Mugg has been pulling throughout the story, the “Gookie”, created by Harpo Marx, which has been Mugg’s way of abruptly exiting each of his unsatisfying adventures up to now:

The pages that went up this week are numbers 98 and 99. You know what THAT means– page 100 drops next week!

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

Work In Progress: Assembled In Illustrator

This week I put up two more pages of my continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. These continue the storyboard sequence showing the history of the 24 Hour Comic, including my own part as the cartoonist holding the World’s Record for 24 Hour Comics– 17 so far:

David Chelsea is listening to: Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld

by Jake Halpern

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

As a special treat for my Patreon subscribers, I also put up a Secret Stash of work-in-progress images showing the creation of some panels from the storyboard sequence in Adobe Illustrator. Instead of drawing the panels by hand, I assembled them from various shaped components; circles, rectangles, and more irregular shapes, as in this example:

Here is a step-by-step demonstration of how I assembled a caricature of 24 hour comic inventor Scott McCloud:

Visit my Patreon page to see the rest of the work-in-progress images. Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon sponsors at the $4.99 level and above.

Scott McCloud And Steve Bissette Make A Guest Appearance On ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

While I have not been blogging about it every week, I have been plugging away at ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, my webcomic about Reality TV, posting two pages most weeks on Patreon. In the most recent installment, we are into Hour Six of the 24 Hour Comic session which is being taped for a Reality TV program hosted by David Chelsea, famous cartoonist. David is being shown storyboards for a proposed animated opening to the program, which would tell the story of the invention of the 24 Hour Comic by Scott McCloud, inspired by his friend Steve Bissette:

David Chelsea is reading: Chicago

by Glenn Head

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? is an all-digital project, with the art mostly drawn in Photoshop, while layouts and balloons are done in InDesign. However, I was going for a change of style in this sequence, more of a Chris Ware/Ivan Brunetti round-headed cartoony look, and I decided the best way to achieve that was to work in Adobe Illustrator. The IN THE STUDIO podcast with Jacob Mercy that I blogged about last week goes into the difference between the raster-based application Photoshop and the vector-based Illustrator. Rather than drawing the panels freehand, I instead assembled the scenes and characters out of geometric shapes. Below, I show all the components that make up one of the characters in the story, along with the completed panel in which he appears:

Adobe Illustrator character components
Final panel

I’ll be posting a fuller work-in-progress sequence of work on Illustrator on Patreon next week.

Meanwhile, I have been continuing to post the occasional End Strip on Patreon as well. This strip features Hestia, the most inert of the Olympian Gods:

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

This Week On Patreon: More Scribe Illustrations And Hour Six On ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

Today on my Patreon page I am posting another installment of my ongoing Secret Stash series of illustrations from the Portland Scribe, drawn in the mid–1970s. This batch includes a decidedly non–PC  tribute to the Native American inventors of the snowshoe:

David Chelsea is reading: Founding Fathers Funnies

by Peter Bagge

This calendar page image would seem to predict a brilliant future for me illustrating heavy-metal album covers, which somehow never came to pass:

Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon sponsors at the $4.99 level and above.

Also this week on Patreon, the latest two-page installment of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, my continuing webcomic set in the world of Reality TV.   This sequence takes place at the taping of a reality show in which participants must draw a 24 Hour Comic. Our lovely hostess Roma introduces us to the goings on at Hour Six:

Mugg, the protagonist of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, is one of the contestants, and coincidentally, the comic he is drawing happens to be the very one we’ve been reading!:

I have also been keeping up a steady supply of the shorter End Strip and Call Slip comics. The most recent is this nonsensical mashup, made up of assorted song lyrics and lines from poems which happen to have an anapestic meter (the Donald Trump quote qualifies as a lyric because the Gregory Brothers put it in one of their Songify The News Videos).

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

The Last of the Facebook Posts Until The Next Batch

David Chelsea Is Watching:Camp

starring Anna Kendrick

Does LinkedIn know about Inane?:

Captain Canada. Was there a Captain Newfoundland before 1949?

Major mindfuck of my childhood: when I first saw a picture of Laurel & Hardy. I had known them as animated characters on CARTOON CIRCUS, and had no idea there were real guys who looked like that:

Scrambled egg,

My baby used to cook me scrambled egg,

But now it seems that I’ve come down a peg,

Oh, how I miss her scrambled egg…..

Some separated at births:

 

 

Could this vintage Felix Lighter have inspired Ian Fleming?:

If Tom & Pippo and Kim & Carrots got in a fight, who would win?

The Friend Zone is not just for men anymore! Some women, and a few men, left in The Zone by the Male Of The Species:

Preview Copies Of PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION!

I have mentioned my upcoming book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION from time to time, but last week it suddenly got more real when I received three advance copies of the book by FedEx. I of course cannot be objective, but I think the book is beautiful– kudos to my editor at Watson-Guptill, Patrick Barb, designers Emily Blevins and Mari Gill, and the entire production team.

David Chelsea is still reading:In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

by Amy Gary

This book is a departure from my previous perspective books in that it deals not so much with perspective theory, but more with application. Basically, it consists of instructions for a number of projects utilizing perspective: zoetropes, anamorphic murals, various kinds of perspective cabinets, and the totally awesome Ames Room, a box constructed in skewed perspective so that identical figures on opposite sides of the room appear to be radically different sizes:

Publication date is January 20 of this year (coincidentally, my wife Eve’s birthday. Early happy birthday, Eve!).

You can preorder this book on Amazon:

RIP, Chuck Berry

Illustration from Eclipse Comics BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES Trading card set, 1994

Get BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES Trading cards from Amazon!:

IN THE STUDIO: Raster Vs. Vector!

Another episode of the ongoing podcast I do with Jacob Mercy just dropped on iTunes. In this installment, Jacob and I talk shop about the virtues and drawbacks of several computer drawing programs, most notably Adobe Illustrator and Clip Studio Paint (the software mysteriously formerly known as Manga Studio). We also get a preview of David’s new instructional book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, a discussion of cartoon dogs and what makes them funny, and some incidental chatter about Winsor McCay’s possible influence on Peter Max. Geek out!!

Listen in iTunes

David Chelsea is reading: Agony

by Mark Beyer

Here are some visual aids for this podcast:

Artwork drawn in Adobe Illustrator:

Dog cartoons drawn in Manga Studio:

The cover of my new book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION:

Winsor McCay and Peter Max- compare and contrast: