David Chelsea's Blog, page 3

Not Your Typical Cat Video

My family and friends love to play the game “Eat Poop You Cat”, especially at large gatherings. This game is the drawing equivalent of the game “Telephone.” The way it’s played is that one person writes a simple description of a scene, preferably something comical like “a badger eating pizza”, then passes it to the next person. That person attempts to draw a picture to match, then folds the paper so that the only their drawing can be seen, and the NEXT person writes a description of that drawing, and so on until there is no more room on the paper. What may start out as the caption “Karen reads a lot of books”can end up as “A man presenting a girl with a snowman for her birthday” once it has traveled down the line.

Nothing beats playing this game in real life, but I hope this new After Effects animation conveys something of what fun it is.

Written and drawn by Eve, Ben, Rebecca, Lolita, Anni, Vanja, Mitch, Eric and David, November 2016

I’ve posted a scan of the original art on Patreon

American Bystander #20

The most recent issue of the American Bystander arrived the other day, just in time for me to read with my noon coffee. This issue sports a cover by the great Peter Kuper:

Cover by Peter Kuper

The overall theme far this ish was New York, so I contributed a comics page combining some dreams I’ve had over the years about moving back to New York. Somehow I always end up walking the streets barefoot:

Buy the American Bystander #20

In other dream news, I took a 5 month break from posting pages in DREAM STUFF, the ongoing story on Patreon also based on my dreams, but just recently I’ve posted two new installments:

Dream Stuff #27:
Dream Stuff #28:

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!

Videos, Videos, Videos

I haven’t put up a blog post in a long time. I hope it hasn’t been TOO long a wait. I have quite a backlog of YouTube videos I either created or appear in to share. First up, a Zoom conference talk on my favorite subject, perspective, with a small and appreciate audience from the group Cartoonists Northwest:

I have been continuing to create new perspective instruction videos for my sponsors at Patreon. However, since not everyone has the $1 a month it takes to sponsor me at the lowest level, I make older videos available after about a year on YouTube. Here are some of the ones I have recently posted:

And lastly, a video I neither created nor appear in. Joshua Kemble and Cory Kerr run a regular vidcast called The IRS Audit, in which they critique favorite independent graphic novels. Recently they turned their gaze on my first graphic novel David Chelsea In Love. I confess I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of this one- I was blushing from all the nice things they had to say about my work- but you didn’t create the book, so go ahead and enjoy it:

That’s all for now. I’ll try to get my next post up sooner.

Perspective Grid Comics And Drawings

My late foster brother Rafael had a Cuban proverb he used to quote to me: “El vago trabajo doble”, which translates to “the lazy one works twice”, which I take to mean that if you’re lazy and skip steps, you’re going to have to work twice as hard fixing all your mistakes later. For me, this proverb comes up a LOT, because I am by no means a systematic or methodical worker. The latest proof of that is today’s subject, a series of posts I’ve been putting up over the course of the last few years on my Patreon page.

David Chelsea is reading: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

These are drawings and comics drawn over perspective grids which were included as a bonus disc with my second perspective book Extreme Perspective! in 2011. Where I screwed up is in not treating them as a proper series from the beginning, and including links to navigate through them in order. ¡El vago so yoy!

Perspective Grid

So, I spent a few hours this weekend rectifying my mistake, and now you can view the entire perspective grid series free on Patreon, beginning with the first (actually it begins with a plain grid, so don’t be thrown):

I usually include three stages of work in my posts: the initial perspective grid, the finished drawing over the grid, and the final art with the underlying grid removed, as in this fisheye view:

Most of these were drawn in photoshop on my computer because I was recording video of the drawing process for my perspective instruction series, and it was easier to get clean-looking results recording from my screen than shooting video over my drawing board. However, now that I have a spiffy new iPad and a ring light, the videos I shoot look good enough that I’m switching to paper for the foreseeable. Here’s the most recent:

As I mentioned, these drawings usually have an accompanying speed demo video, though not always. Perspective videos stay behind a paywall on my Patreon page for about a year before I release them for free on Youtube.

Here are the perspective grid videos that are up as of today:

Oh, and check out Extreme Perspective! to see the full selection of perspective grids.

After you read through the perspective series, maybe look at some of the other comics I’ve posted to Patreon, like Call Slip Comics, End Strips , and Dream Stuff, a long story based on my dreams. If you’re feeling flush, maybe from your COVID check, maybe sign up as a supporter and see all the stuff that’s behind a paywall, including sketchbook pages, work in progress, and all the most recent speed demo videos!

PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event: Watch Me Live & Save Up To $300!

Well, you missed your chance to sign up for the PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event by Palm Sunday to save $500 off the retail price, but no problem- you can still register by April 11th and save $300! Go here and find out how!

I will be presenting a live-on-video online perspective drawing demonstration as part of the event. This will be similar to the perspective speed demos I have been posting on Patreon for the past year, but in real time and with my spoken commentary guiding you through every step of the process. Full disclosure: my demonstration will not literally be plein air, as in drawn outdoors. It will be a simple one-point perspective of an imaginary room. The organizers told me that was fine with them. I will also be responding in real time to questions in streaming chat. Since I am not a touch typist, I will be using my iPad’s voice recognition software.

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

Oh, and check out my most recent free video on YouTube, in which I move the Beatles indoors from the Abbey Road crossing by adroit use of perspective. Stick around to the end, and see an ad for the PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event!

PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event: Watch Me Live & Save Up To $500!

Today, Palm Sunday, is the LAST DAY to save up to $500 on the retail price for PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event! A lot of attendees wait until the day of the deadline to purchase- could that be YOU?

In case you missed my previous blog post, here’s a recap: I will be presenting a live-on-video online perspective drawing demonstration as part of the event. This will be similar to the perspective speed demos I have been posting on Patreon for the past year, but in real time and with my spoken commentary guiding you through every step of the process. Full disclosure: my demonstration will not literally be plein air, as in drawn outdoors. It will be a simple one-point perspective of an imaginary room. The organizers told me that was fine with them. I will also be responding in real time to questions in streaming chat. Since I am not a touch typist, I will be using my iPad’s voice recognition software.

David Chelsea is watching:
Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season

Here are some screencaps from my video presentation:

Setting Diagonal Vanishing PointAdding Architectural Details To Basic BoxLast Details In PencilInkingFinal Art

Registration is now open for PleinAir Live. To find out more and sign up for this global virtual art training opportunity, visit PleinAirLive.com.” If you don’t do it today, I can’t save you any money!

RIP, Anne Richardson

Anne Richardson

I hope you were happy to read my blog post about the PleinAir Conference last week. Did you notice that it was my first post since November? The story behind that is the all too familiar one of technology evolving beyond the ability of one backward Boomer with a 2012 Mac to keep pace. Many thanks to Brad Smith and his crew at Hot Pepper for bringing my code up to date!

David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

Now that I’m back online, a bit of unfinished business. I had meant to get this memorial note up for my friend Anne Richardson, who died of cancer in mid- October. From an online obituary:

“Anne Richardson
April 19, 1954 – Oct. 14, 2020
Anne Richardson, Oregon film activist and author, died Oct. 14, 2020, in Portland. Born April 19, 1954 in Dodgeville, Wis., she spent her teen years in Portland and went on to Sarah Lawrence College and then Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in Film.

She returned to Portland and in 2006 dug into what would become her passion — Oregon’s contribution to film making, animation and print cartooning.

She and her husband, Dennis Nyback, founded the Oregon Cartoon Institute in 2007 to create resources and programs about cartooning and animation. In 2009 they hosted the Sesquicentennial Film Festival at Marylhurst College. Anne also originated the Oregon Film History Conference in 2015.

Anne taught at the State University of New York’s Kingsborough College, Linfield College, and Portland State University. She is the author of numerous papers and articles, several multimedia presentations, including the short film “A Boy and His Car,” and the blog “Oregon Movies A to Z.” She had begun a book about Oregon film history when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in May.

In addition to her husband and collaborator, Nyback, Anne leaves behind her daughter, Jenna Sarowitz; three grandchildren, Samuel Thelonius Bott, Theadora Joy Bott, and Bartholomew Bott; and seven siblings, Mary Richardson, Susan Richardson, John Richardson, Gillian Richardson, Sarah Richardson, Thomas Richardson, and Katherine Richardson Bruna.

Anne wrote that Portland and Oregon’s early investment in arts education, together with local postwar technological innovations, seeded a unique regional culture for making independent film and animation. She strove to foster awareness of this history in hopes of maintaining Oregon’s strength as a center of artistic endeavor. She particularly wanted to inspire Oregon’s youth with the state’s hidden history as an independent arts powerhouse.

Please sign the online guest book at www.oregonlive.com/obits

To Plant Memorial Trees in memory, please visit our Sympathy Store.”

I knew Anne from early childhood. Her parents had met my parents through liberal Portland circles and become good friends, which meant my sisters and I hung out with the Richardson’s kids a lot. There were eight of them, six of them daughters, so it was hard to pick out Anne from the rest. At a time when we knew a lot of big Catholic families, the Richardsons were unusual for being a big Protestant family; Anne’s dad Harper Richardson was a Methodist minister who scandalized his flock by sermonizing for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. My earliest specific memory of Anne is when she showed up at my door one day with a chess problem, figuring that I could solve it. She seemed to have an inflated sense of my intellect- I would have been around ten at the time- because I had no idea at all.

We stayed in touch through the years. In the 1980s we both lived in New York City. Anne was in film school at Columbia, and I was making my way as a freelance illustrator. It was then that I drew Anne with her sister Sarah in my sketchbook:

 

In the 1990s, we both moved back to Portland. Anne always gave me credit for inspiring her to found the Oregon Cartoon Institute. One day I casually mentioned to her that legendary cartoonist Basil Wolverton came from Portland, which made her realize like a bolt from the blue that Portland had always been a cartooning Mecca. She founded the Institute in 2007 to spread the word.

One way the Institute spread the word was by hosting an annual Oregon Film History Conference, and occasional one-off events like this one on the history of Portland’s underground press. I was a speaker at that, and Matt Groening was a surprise guest:

Photos from the UNDERGROUND USA event

Anne’s friends and family gathered for a suitably distanced memorial event at the Redwood Deck in the Hoyt Arboretum at the end of October. There were readings of “Out of the Cradle” by Walt Whitman, and a group song led by Anne’s daughter Jenna. At the close of the ceremony, we were invited to look up:

Anne’s Columbia student film A Boy And His Car on YouTube

By coincidence, another old friend in the cartooning world died the same day as Anne. David Geiser was in the first generation of Underground cartoonists- a great friend of S. Clay Wilson’s, apparently- but I was not aware at all of him until I rented studio space from him on Broadway near Prince Street in the 1980s, by which time he had become an abstract painter. After Eve & I moved to Portland, we stayed vaguely in touch. Dave’s style edged back to a kind of Philip Guston cartooniness, and he married Mercedes Ruehl, of all people. I never did get around to reading his comics work, which has never to my knowledge been collected in book form.

PleinAir Live 2021

Got any plans for April? Here’s where I’m going to be:

David Chelsea is reading: Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
by Christopher Bonanos

“The publishers of PleinAir Magazine (sister publication to Realism Today) have announced they will be producing and hosting an innovative virtual art training experience where artists from all over the world will learn from some of today’s most talented and successful professional artists and instructors.

The event, PleinAir Live, will be held online April 15-17, 2021. Interest in plein air painting, the practice of painting outdoors, has grown exponentially as more artists blend their love of painting with their love of the outdoors.

The event features the world’s top artists doing painting demonstrations, along with talks and discussions. Attendees can go into breakout rooms with others for further discussion, and there is a paint-along for the entire group at the end of each day.

In 2020, over 1,000 artists from all around the world attended the first PleinAir Live virtual event (see the 2020 recap of Plein Air Live here).

Magazine publisher and event host B. Eric Rhoads says, “For years we’ve been hosting annual conventions and expos and always have excellent attendance. However, the pandemic caused us to quickly find new and different ways to meet our mission of teaching millions of people to paint.

“We figured out how to deliver a high-quality and entertaining online experience to our worldwide audience that is more than just a Zoom call. Because we have video studios and a soundstage, we are able to produce an event at the quality level of network television.

“Since that first global virtual event, we’ve held several others, including Realism Live and Watercolor Live, reaching several thousand artists.”

Artist and gallery owner Elaine Miller says, “I went to art school, and this is better because it features the best working professionals alive and provides more information in four days than I got in years of school.”

PleinAir Live is for all skill levels, and previous painting experience is not required. The ticket includes access to replays of the entire event so guests can watch as many times as they’d like.

Registration is now open for PleinAir Live. To find out more and sign up for this global virtual art training opportunity, visit PleinAirLive.com.”

The organizers don’t mention me in the text, which can only be an editorial oversight. I will be presenting a live-on-video online perspective drawing demonstration as part of the event. This will be similar to the perspective speed demos I have been posting on Patreon for the past year, but in real time and with my spoken commentary guiding you through every step of the process. Full disclosure: my demonstration will not literally be plein air, as in drawn outdoors. It will be a simple one-point perspective of an imaginary room. The organizers told me that was fine with them. I will also be responding in real time to questions in streaming chat. Since I am not a touch typist, I will be using my iPad’s voice recognition software.

Boy, I HOPE that works… Maybe I should try a dry run. I’d hate for the results to be as far off the mark as the captioning on news at the airport.

I think I’ll try answering the Proust Questionnaire in voice recognition:

__1.__What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Not feeling the need to look at the clock.

__2.__What is your greatest fear?

Incapacity.

__3.__What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

I am a terrible listener.

__4.__What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Blind partisanship.

__5.__Which living person do you most admire?

This is boring, but former President Barack Obama.

__6.__What is your greatest extravagance?

I waste a lot of time.

__7.__What is your current state of mind?

Apprehensive about that voice recognition experiment.

__8.__What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Piety.

__9.__On what occasion do you lie?

Only with my mouth is open.

__10.__What do you most dislike about your appearance?

I don’t look enough like my self portraits.

__11.__Which living person do you most despise?

It varies. Rudy Giuliani is up there.

__12.__What is the quality you most like in a man?

Sense of humor.

__13.__What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Same, I think.

__14.__Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

I tend to over use “seemingly”.

__15.__What or who is the greatest love of your life?

I am married to her.

Well, that went better than expected. I WAS speaking very slowly and carefully. I have not edited the foregoing, and the only typo was in my answer to question #9, where I meant to say “only when my mouth is open.”

All in all, an encouraging dry run. I will be posting more about this event in coming weeks.

RIP, Sean Connery

[image error] Panel from The Girl With Panel from “The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes”, published in Dark Horse Presents

24 Hour Comic: Winston Is Good!

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I drew my 21st 24 Hour Comic alone in my studio on this past 24 Hour Comics Day, Saturday and Sunday, October 3-4, beginning at 8 am and ending up exactly 24 hours later. The comic was drawn as a fundraiser for various Democratic political campaigns, including Biden for President, Amy McGrath for Senate, and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. Sponsors pledged a given amount for each page I completed.

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This comic features our family cat, presumed Maine Coon cross Winston. (A decade or so ago, I drew a 24 Hour Comic featuring Winston’s predecessor Bingo. That comic appears in my first 24 Hour Comic collection from Dark Horse, Everybody Gets It Wrong!)

[image error] Winston for real

Blog post about Bingo

BINGO THE CAT appears in the collection EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, from Dark Horse, which you can order from Amazon:

Winston recounts his experience of the turbulent past year, takes you through a typical day, and outlines some of his pet likes and dislikes, before the story veers into surreal territory, dramatizing some of my dreams about Winston:

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I drew the story in pencil on linen finish paper. I had hoped to be able to draw more than one page an hour by skipping the inking stage, the way I had with last year’s ink-only comic, but the penciling was so involved that I was only barely able to keep pace.

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The events of the past year leave little impression on Winston, but he does note September’s wildfires:

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Winston also gives a shout-out to my sometime assistant Jacob Mercy:

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Thanks to all my sponsors: Matt Burkholz, Eve, Ben, Rebecca & Anny Celsi, Lisa Guggenheim & Rob Daitch, Jonathan Dubay, Ivan Pyzow, Gena & Jules Renaud, Jeff Seats, Beth Sparrow, Barbara Stross, and John Weeks. It’s not too late to join them! Simply donate an amount (ideally, some multiple of 24) to one of the designated campaigns, and inform me of your donation (you can use the contact link on the website) and your street address in order to revive a handsomely home-printed and personally inscribed copy of the comic. It’s the only way you can read the full comic, since I have no plans to post it on Patreon!