David Chelsea's Blog, page 21

SLEEPLESS In SLEEPLESS

Here is the second of a series giving background on the stories in my second collection of 24 hour comics, SLEEPLESS, published by Dark Horse last month. This one is about the title story, which I drew in 2007.

David Chelsea is reading: Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959

by David Kynaston

I have long suffered from insomnia, and it seemed a natural subject for a story that I would ultimately be drawing in the wee small hours. I intended it to be a companion piece to title story of my first collection, EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, an essay in comics form, arguing that autobiographical stories, especially ones recounting dreams, should be drawn “subjective camera”- that is, from the point of view of the central figure. In this story I put that narrative method into practice, telling it entirely through the eyes of a character who is never seen, except once in the mirror.

For this story I used the pencil on coquille board technique that I had also used in WELCOME TO THE ZONE, as well as many illustrations for the New York Press, the New York Observer, and other clients. However, I added one variation, which was that I printed six squares of a toothbrush spatter pattern onto the paper before I began drawing. This meant that I had the suggestive beginnings of an image before I began drawing- this worked particularly well for a page in which nothing was shown but successive stages of a lava lamp:

 

This technique also meant that I had to apply to apply wite-out in order to have any white space at all in the picture. Adding dialogue balloons would have been too difficult, so instead I wrote the dialogue under each panel, a method I haven’t used before or since.

Some of the story elements came from my own dreams (the barefoot on wet pavement one is particularly frequent):

Some elements came from illustrations I was working on for the Eight Day Week column in The New York Observer. Look for the Mad Hatter from Batman, a birdbath, and Isabella Rossellini in BLUE VELVET.

 

(The  Isabella look-alike character is a cartoonist, which definitely puts this story in the realm of unreality. I have known some attractive female cartoonists in my time, but none I would describe as glamorous.)

Want to know what all the fuss about? Order the book from Amazon!:

Third Thursday on Patreon: Windows Computer Scam and Celebrity Envelopes: The Women

It’s the Third Thursday of the month, when I post another page of my continuing reality TV webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, as well as The Secret Stash Of The Month on my Patreon page.

David Chelsea is reading: Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

Simon Garfield

This week’s installment finds Mugg dropping in as the devil is up to yet more routine mischief; this time he’s running a phone scam from a call center in India:

I know this particular scam well, because I get calls of this nature at least once a week. Invariably, it’s a fellow with a heavy Indian accent telling me there’s a problem with my Windows computer, which he can fix remotely. From what I have read, the fix involves installing spyware, harvesting personal information, or even accessing the mark’s bank account. If you’re smart enough to read this website, you’re probably not dumb enough to fall for this con, but just in case, DON’T FALL FOR IT!

By the way, I don’t happen to own a Windows computer. I use a Mac. When I told one of these callers as much, he was incredulous “You don’t have a Windows computer? Don’t you like Windows?” “No, I like Macs.” “Then you can go to hell!”

There are many websites debunking this scam; here’s one that is pretty detailed.

If you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

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 month’s Secret Stash is a companion piece to one from a few months ago. Then, it was Celebrity Men on envelopes I have sent to various correspondents over the years. This time, it is Celebrity Women. Unlike the men, who were actors, politicians, writers, and musicians, these are mostly actresses, mostly from the 1970s, (Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Carol Kane show up multiple times) many of them in fetching states of undress, like this one of Jodie Foster:

Because there are more men than women in the collection I have accumulated, I have also included envelopes showing male and female celebrities together, such as this one of Mark Hamill and Annie Potts starring in the 1970s cult classic Corvette Summer:

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

This Week On Patreon: PalmPilot Comics, And David Chelsea Gets A New Look!

My apologies for being later and later with these blog posts. Last Thursday I put up my usual archive comics on Patreon, along with the latest page of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, the Reality TV web comic.

David Chelsea is reading: Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency

by David Greenberg

This month’s archive comic is a selection of strips that I drew in the notepad application for my Palm Zire 71 around 2004-2005.

Palm Zire 71

The Palm Zire 71 was a handheld device operated with a stylus, which contained a calculator, a crude camera, a drawing program, the ability to play music files, and primitive handwriting recognition software similar to that on the Apple Newton. It did not contain a phone, or any way of connecting to the Internet. It was already somewhat behind the curve in 2004, but then so was I.

This was my way, as a longtime artist on paper, of dipping a toe in digital media. I had severe limitations to work with; the Notepad window was only around 350 pixels wide, and three times as tall as wide, which pretty much restricted me to three panels for every strip. I was somewhat inspired by James Kochalka’s book SKETCHBOOK DIARY, though I was never able to match his rate of one strip day. Some of the strips recounted dreams, some were little observations about everyday life, some were just random sketches. The one below is a true period piece; I would not dream of venturing into New York City today without at least a smart phone:

This strip is another appearance of our late family pet, Bingo The Cat:

Also this week, the conclusion of a sequence set on the reality show Closet Cleanse, which I based on the popular TV show What Not To Wear. In this sequence, autobiographical cartoonist David Chelsea has gotten a makeover, and has turned into quite the fashion plate. Mandy, the co-host, is much impressed. Mugg does not appear to be pleased:

For my new, ludicrous, boy-toy look, I had to look no farther than Google Image Search: Male Catwalk:

By the way, if you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

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!

Modern Love Podcast: “My First Lesson in Motherhood”

The New York Times Modern Love Podcast has been going for some months, but the first one featuring an illustration from the period when I illustrated the column is online today. In this week’s episode of the Modern Love Podcast, the actress Connie Britton (“Nashville,” “Friday Night Lights”) reads Elizabeth Fitzsimons’s 2007 essay, “My First Lesson in Motherhood,” about a woman’s almost immediate challenges with a daughter adopted from China.

David Chelsea is reading: Walking the Dog

by David Hughes

Connie Britton

This illustration is a truncated version of my original idea. The editors had approved a sketch showing the woman holding a baby with a broken head, while on the table in front of her were three intact baby heads, with each neck having a screw-in end like a light bulb. However, when the editors saw the finish, they got cold feet, and told me to cut out the table. To my mind, that made the whole thing inexplicable- but one COULD argue that the mysteriously cracked baby head without the other heads for comparison makes for a nicely enigmatic image.

First Thursday On Patreon: Fan Art & Closet Cleanse

Yesterday was the First Thursday of the month, when I post Fan Art and a new installment of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? to my Patreon page.

David Chelsea Is Listening To: Purity: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

In ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, the serialized web comic about Reality TV, Mugg finds himself co-hosting a makeover show called Closet Cleanse, with girl of his dreams Mandy. The show is closely modeled on What Not To Wear, a show hosted by Stacy London and Clinton Kelly, which ran for ten years on TLC:

Stacy London & Clinton Kelly

It was the cancellation two years ago of What Not Wear that finally spurred me to turn the 24 Hour Comic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? into a full-fledged webcomic. I realized that I needed to act fast on this project, before all the references to existing shows became hopelessly dated.

The premise of What Not To Wear was that some individual with conspicuously awful taste in clothes (nominated by family or friends) was subjected to a makeover by style mavens Stacy and Clinton. The stages were highly ritualized; snarky Stacy and swishy Clinton usher their guest into a mirrored room, where they can see how awful they look from all possible angles, purge their closet of nearly every item, mercilessly mocking their awful taste all the while, lay out a few simple style rules (no horizontal stripes! no pleats!), send the guest to a high-end clothing store with a credit card, intervene when the guest drifts back to old, bad habits, stage a fashion show with their purchases, and finally unveil the new, style-savvy version to a group of family & friends (my usual take was that the show took someone with quirky, individual style, and substituted a boring and corporate look, but the guests always looked pleased).

I make another of my guest appearances as the makeover subject:

Next week we unveil my new look!

By the way, if you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

For this month’s Fan Art, I’m posting more drawings done at the ages of 4 to 5. This time it’s characters from Early 1960s Saturday Morning TV, Linus The Lionhearted and Alvin & The Chipmunks.

Alvin and his brothers Simon and Theodore probably need no introduction, since they are still making records and appearing in movies. My drawings are based on how they looked on The Alvin Show, which ran on CBS for one season in 1961-1962, and on syndication for years after that.

Alvin & The Chipmunks

Linus may be harder to identify for anyone under say, fifty. Voiced by veteran actor Sheldon Leonard, he began as a pitchman in commercials for the cereal Hearts Of Oats in the late 50s, then when that cereal was discontinued, he sold Crispy Critters. His Crispy Critters ads were so popular that Linus got his own show in 1964, appearing alongside other Post Cereal pitchmen Rory Raccoon (Post Toasties), Lovable Truly (Alpha-Bits), Sugar Bear (Sugar Smacks), and So-Hi (Rice Krinkles).

Eventually, the FCC made a ruling that forbade children’s show characters from appearing in advertisements on the same program, and the show was cancelled. Linus lingered on for a while in commercials, but eventually disappeared altogether when Crispy Critters was discontinued.

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!

SLEEPLESS: SNOW ANGEL, the 24 Hour Comic

My newest book, SLEEPLESS AND OTHER STORIES: DAVID CHELSEA’S 24-HOUR COMICS, VOL.2, was published by Dark Horse last month, and is available in stores now (and downloadable in e-book form here). I’m doing a series of posts about the six stories in it, starting with this one on the original 24 Hour Comics version of SNOW ANGEL:

David Chelsea is reading: Killing and Dying

by Adrian Tomine

This is the first 24 hour comic I drew outside of my own studio, and the first appearance of my superhero character Snow Angel. It was drawn at an event on 24 hour Comics Day, in October 2007, at Pacific Northwest College of Art’s library. I originally intended this story for an anthology that a freelance editor was putting together with the general theme of snow. When that anthology was canceled, I reworked the story in color, using a combination of watercolor and airbrush, and submitted it to Mike Richardson at DARK HORSE PRESENTS. The rest is history.

Panel from the original version of SNOW ANGEL
Panel from the version of SNOW ANGEL in DARK HORSE PRESENTS

Briefly, this is the story of a little girl (modeled on my then-seven year old daughter Rebecca) who turns into a crimefighting angel when she makes an angel in the snow. The crime she fights is on the slight side- littering and bicycle theft in this story (in later stories she battles jaywalkers and copyright infringers at a comics convention).

The original version has an extreme case of a problem I often encounter in drawing 24 Hour Comics. When I have a very specific story with a beginning, middle, and end in mind, I will often race to tell it in the most speedy and economical way possible, so that I don’t run out of pages– and then find myself running out of story with 10 or so pages left to fill. In this case, I filled the remaining pages with extremely tedious banter between the characters Falcon and Snowman. When I reworked this story for DARK HORSE PRESENTS, I did my best to cut that sequence to the bone (I didn’t cut it entirely, because I liked the bit about the William Henry Harrison Snow Globe).

Snowman and Falcon: on the cutting room floor.

Eventually the DARK HORSE PRESENTS version of this story was published as a one-shot comic book, and a book-length collection of new stories about the character Snow Angel will be published by Dark Horse this month.

SLEEPLESS AND OTHER STORIES: DAVID CHELSEA’S 24-HOUR COMICS, VOL.2

Publisher: Dark Horse

Publication Date: March 16, 2016

Format: b&w, 168 pages; HC, 6” x 9”

Price: $19.99

Age range: 16

ISBN-10: 1-61655-884-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-61655-884-0

Order the book from Amazon here!:

Work In Progress on Patreon: The Unified Field.

This past Thursday was the fifth Thursday of the month, and rather than doing my usual second online hangout, I decided to post some work in progress, panels from my upcoming book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, which will be published next year by Watson-Guptill, on my Patreon page.

David Chelsea is reading:

William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 9th President,1841

by Gail Collins

This post announces to the world what I believe is a new discovery in perspective. For some years I have been working on what I call “The Unified Field”, a way to work out any angle of one- two- or three-point perspective within a single picture. It has always been a problem in constructing three-point perspective that there is no easy way to combine it in the same picture with one- or two-point perspective, or with a different angle of three-point perspective. When you rotate an object relative to its surroundings, the vanishing points rotate too, and must occupy new, very specific positions depending on the precise angle of rotation. Placing them wrongly introduces an unavoidable element of distortion.

In the past my efforts have involved drawing a large chart mapping out every possible vanishing point on multiple horizons, with lines between them making hyperbolic tracks in the sky. The problem is that if this involves every possible angle of perspective it becomes a very large chart indeed; because all vanishing point but the central one are at infinity in one-point perspective, angles of perspective that are very close to one-point will have vanishing points located at a ludicrous distance from the center of vision:

My other attempt at a visual representation of The Unified Field involved a complicated Escher-type globe on which the corners of multiply tilted cubes can be plotted, which I’m not sure even Escher could have made clear:

This time I have not a chart, but a method to find vanishing points that I believe will work in all cases.

The panels posted on Patreon should lay my method out with clarity, but basically it can be boiled down to this: the central vertical line in any three-point perspective, from the top horizon to the bottom vanishing point, covers 90° of the visual field. Two lines drawn from the top and bottom of that line, meeting at a 90° angle, establish a sideways measuring point. From that measuring point, the 90° corner can be tilted up or down to establish a position of a new horizon and bottom vanishing point. The length of the line between the measuring point and the top horizon can be rotated down to the central vertical line, and that point becomes a new measuring point to establish vanishing points on the top horizon.

While this may seem like advanced stuff, my hope is that this will simplify three-point perspective by turning it from a construction that must be drawn from scratch each time, to something that can be naturally built on top of an existing one- or two-point diagram. It is only embarrassing to me that I made this discovery so late, after already having written two books on the subject.

Also posted last Thursday on Patreon, the latest page of my continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? In this one, Mugg is still visiting with the devil in Nigeria:

By the way, if you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.

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!

David Chelsea Draws The Writers of Willamette Week

I recently posted about the first illustrations I had done for Willamette Week since 1978, a pair of caricatures of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I’ve just gotten another, bigger assignment from Willamette Week art director Julie Showers, doing illustrated portraits of their staff writers, which will run with their bylines in the paper. Here’s what one looks like on the Willamette Week website:

David Chelsea is watching:

Spy

starring Melissa McCarthy

I used the same technique that I used for caricatures in the New York Observer, as well as for many other illustrations– drawing them in pencil on coquille board, scanning the art at a very high contrast, and converting the file to bitmap in Photoshop:

Original coquille board drawing
Final line drawing

I think the series came out very well. On the website and in the paper, the drawings appear very, very tiny,

but here on my own website, I would like to show them BIG. Drumroll! Here are all of them in alphabetical order :

Liz Acker
Martin Cizmar
Nigel Jaquiss
Matthew Korfhage
Aaron Mesh
Rachel Monahan
Matthew Singer
Beth Slovic
Enid Spitz
Mark Zusman

By the way, I worked from photographs, and have never met any of these writers. But they do seem like a nice bunch of folks, don’t they?

Read the Willamette Week (with my illustrations)! Here’s the homepage.

More Of Those Facebook Posts You’ve Been Hearing So Much About

David Chelsea is reading: The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir

by Riad Sattouf

Strangely malformed coffee filter:

Here’s why I prefer the Golden to the Silver Age:

I saw an article on Salon today advocating that we abolish the police. It made me curious about what we might replace them with, so I googled “replace the police”. This is what comes up first:

Parallel Evolution in FUTURAMA and ARCHER:

This is why I don’t ever want to get a tattoo:

Am I the only one who thinks white-on-black silhouettes just look wrong?:

Who else would like to see Elizabeth Marvel play Mary Marvel?

My Millennial friends tell me that the fedora has become toxic by association with a type of obnoxious dude who ostentatiously tips his hat while saying “m’lady” to single women, in a way that verges on sexual harassment. I’ve been wearing fedoras since the 1980s, and my friends assure me that I’m such an old guy my fedora use is grandfathered in, but if this keeps up I may have to switch to a homburg (this hat, by the way, is actually a trilby).

from Eadweard Muybridge: The Original Ice Bucket Challenge:

Since it was my grandmother’s name, I had to try the Aurora apple. Verdict: pleasant, unassuming flavor, a bit like Opal but not as chewy or dense. I would definitely buy it again, unlike the thoroughly undistinguished Eve. Are there any other apples out there with the names of my female relatives? Rebecca or Lolita apple, anybody?:

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? Goes to Nigeria

Yesterday I posted the latest page of my continuing webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on my Patreon page. In this installment, Mugg drops in on the consulting demon Diavolo Chelzapoppin as he is performing some routine mischief, this time in Nigeria:

David Chelsea is listening to: My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel

by Elizabeth Strout

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!

By the way, if you are coming late to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, or missed some weeks and want to catch up, check out the Tumblr archive, starting here.