David Chelsea's Blog, page 4

RIP, Helen Reddy

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Too soon?

24 Hour Comic Day 2020: The Pitch

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David Chelsea is reading: Dreyer’s English

by Benjamin Dreyer

This entry should be self-explanatory. Click here to read the comic big on Patreon.

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Back To Report After The Day

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It’s been a busy quarantine, so much so that I haven’t had time for a lot of unfinished business, and that includes something I promised you all back in OCTOBER, a report on my 20th and most recent 24 Hour Comic!

David Chelsea is reading:

Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

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This story is called 24#20, and you can read it on Patreon starting here. What makes this 24 hour comic different from all my previous ones is that this is the first time I skipped the penciling stage, on the grounds of why draw stuff that you’re going to erase anyway? This saved time, enabling me to finish 24 pages, not in the usual 24 hours, but a mere eight. Did it affect quality? I’ll let you be the judges.

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As with a couple of previous 24s, I decided to make this one a fundraiser- only I couldn’t decide on a cause, so I left it up to donors to decide. In the end, I managed to attract only one sponsor, and he chose the venerable charity CARE. The next 24 in October is almost certainly going to be a fundraiser for a political campaign- if not the presidential race, then winning a Democratic Senate.

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The story, such as it is, consists of me giving a report on what I did in the year since my previous 24 Hour Comic. As such, it is an interesting time capsule of those innocent days pre-COVID. It includes a milestone birthday:

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It also included a visit to the annual Democratic Party dinner named for my late father Dick Celsi, at which there was a group sing about my father’s love of beer (I don’t remember Dad particularly liking beer, but maybe this crowd of old party activists knew him better than I did).:

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Speaking of family, I include a plug for my sister Anny’s most recent music release Kaleidoscope Heart,an LP on gold vinyl. Buy it here!

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At one point I draw from nude life models for a couple of pages, courtesy of the online drawing studio Croquis Cafe:

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And I mention my animated credits work on the independent film Earthlings, which was THIS close to being released before the pandemic hit:

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And so, so much more! Check it out for free on Patreon- and if the comic puts you in a beneficent mood, you can sign up for my Patreon page, which entitles you to sponsor-only content like the 1983 sketchbook pages I’m presently posting, and my long-running series of perspective instruction videos! Membership start at the low rate of $1 a month.

Also recently posted on Patreon: a couple of animated versions of palindrome comics done in Adobe After Effects. See all of this one here!:

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Also, my new comics series Dream Stuff, based on the past decade or so of dreams I’ve been posting to Facebook. Spot the celebrities, including Daniel Day-Lewis!:

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I’ll be back presently to report on my gingerly steps out of quarantine. Good health!

RIP, Lynn Shelton

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Last week I learned of the death of someone I knew from New York theater days, the screenwriter and director Lynn Shelton. In the 1980s, Lynn was a member of the Bad Neighbors, a theater group mostly made up of my sister Teresa’s friends from NYU.

David Chelsea is reading: The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

[image error] Lynn Shelton, Manhattan, Early 1990s

Lynn and her husband Kevin moved to Seattle a few years before Eve & I moved to Portland, and within a few years Lynn emerged as a highly praised independent film director, best known for Humpday- to my great surprise, since Lynn had only been an actress in Bad Neighbors.

Coincidentally, I was working on a comic depicting Toby Huss, another actor I knew from New York days, who appeared in Lynn’s last feature, Sword of Trust.

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RIP, Lynn Shelton. My condolences to her friends and family.

RIP, Little Richard

[image error] Illustration from the BLOCKBUSTERS OF RHYTHM & BLUES trading card set, 1994

Quarantine Continues

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A month and change into the quarantine, and things have settled into a routine. Every morning I wake up around 6:30, have coffee and a frozen banana for breakfast (I’m trying to avoid putting on quarantine weight as well as using less toilet paper), feed Winston, post dreams to Facebook, and then work until noon, when I have… another cup of coffee (and feed Winston some dry food). Eve usually answers work emails for an hour or so in the morning, then goes outside to do stuff in the garden. After noon I usually put in a little time pulling weeds (the focus this week- bluebells!), work in the studio for a few more hours, maybe take a leisurely bike ride around the neighborhood in the afternoon. At seven, just before dinner, (and around the time Winston gets his third feeding- he’s a growing boy), Eve & I go outside and bang pots and pans or beat on a drum with our neighbors. Theoretically, this ritual honors essential workers, but mostly it just lets off steam. Then Eve & I watch TV: So far we’ve watched Season 3 of Ozark, Mrs. Fletcher, Avenue 5, Season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Some of Dave and What We Do In The Shadows, and two and a half seasons of Better Things. I usually get sleepy and head off to bed between 9 and 10.

Some weekly events punctuate the Groundhog’s Day sameness. Saturday morning we do our weekly Zoom conference with scattered family. Wednesday evening garbage goes out. Various podcasts arrive on schedule to tell me what day it is. Ken Jennings’s Trivia Quiz email tells me it’s Tuesday.

I’ve been making little tweaks here and there to my Patreon page. Recently, I decided to add links connecting all the Call Slip Comics I have posted over the past few years. Cheer your confinement by recalling the bygone days of when libraries were still open! Now you can read the strips in order, starting from the very first:

David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

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I have been continuing to post new content as well. My recently inaugurated strip DREAM STUFF is still on a Presidents kick:

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I have been posting new perspective videos every two weeks or so. The most recent demonstrates how to draw vertical two-point perspective.

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Since so many perspective fans are undergoing financial hardship during these days of quarantine, I have decided to make some instructional videos previously seen only on Patreon available to all. This is the first. l will be releasing previously exclusive videos to YouTube on a two week schedule. To see still exclusive videos, sign up as a subscriber to my Patreon page.

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There is more to work on besides stuff for Patreon. The most recent issue of the American Bystander arrived yesterday just in time for me to read with my noon coffee. This issue sports a cover by the great John Cuneo, and contains stellar contributions from regulars Peter Kuper, George Booth, Roz Chast, Brian McConnachie, and many others. It also contains my latest illustration, for a piece about a futuristic app that erases everyone’s privacy by Google Cloud editor Quentin Hardy.

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I’m not sure if this image, which was executed some months ago, exactly speaks to the present moment. The reliance on portable devices rings true, but the social distancing is all wrong:

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As usual, I combined two separate pieces of original art to arrive at the final image. I considerably tweaked and desaturated the color to get a suitably bleak dystopian look.

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It’s always nice to try new things, and a recent commission for Oakwood Gardens in Hillsboro had me designing something I had never done before: a hex sign. Owner Julie Safley was ready to replace eight worn-out hex signs mounted to barns on the property, and asked me to come up with a similar design that honored those indispensable pollinators, the bees:

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My design was executed in Adobe Illustrator, which I use infrequently, but which works well for assignments that call for a tidy and symmetrical design:

[image error]A local sign painter executed the design on wooden panels:

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And here is one of the finished panels, mounted in place on a barn:

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Notes From Quarantine

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With nearly everyone confined to quarters for the foreseeable, everyone has a quarantine story to tell. This is mine.

I was leading pretty much my normal life up to the week of March 9th. On Wednesday the 11th, I had lunch with my publisher- ordering actual food from a restaurant- and had a studio visit from a friend’s high school-age son in the afternoon. Thursday I had a date to go to the theater to see a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with my sister Teresa, but had one wary eye on the headlines- schools had already been closed, and the governor had banned gatherings of over 250 people. I checked the theater’s website that morning to see if the show was cancelled, and saw that a planned matinee was going ahead, but that the status beyond that was uncertain. A few hours later they cancelled the rest of the run.

I had my usual Friday visit on the 13th with my hangout buddy and sometime assistant Jacob Mercy, in which we were careful to avoid standing too close or god forbid, shaking hands, but that is the last social interaction I have had with anyone not in my immediate family. The store my wife Eve manages was slipping into closing by degrees- first, closing one day a week, then taking a planned two week holiday, then shutting until further notice.

Our daughter Rebecca flew home from LA on Tuesday the 17th- classes at UCLA had gone online, but she had intended to stay in the dorms through finals week, but we were worried that flights might be cancelled altogether. The three of us stayed in the house together, apart from a two-day trip to the coast, for the next ten days.

David Chelsea is reading: The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

We took precautions on the trip, staying a safe distance from others, and carefully wiping surfaces in the house we stayed at. Here are Rebecca and Eve at Ona Beach State Park:

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Here are some glassy pebbles we collected at Smelt Sands:

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Rebecca flew back to LA on Friday the 20th (Flights have still not been cancelled; Rebecca says there were four other passengers on the plane). Even though most of her college-age friends are studying from their old bedrooms, Rebecca wanted to spend Spring Quarter with her friends from school. She and four of her best friends have sublet an apartment in LA, where they’re going to spend the rest of the school year.

Eve and I are now alone together in the house 24/7, apart from occasional shopping forays. We’ve been catching up on Ozark and Tiger King on Netflix, and on warmish days we work in the garden. At Seven O’Clock every night we and the neighbors on our street go out on our porches and beat drums and blow trumpets to honor essential workers, and basically check to see that we’re all still OK. So far, no one on the block has fallen ill.

Last Saturday morning, we held a conference call on Zoom among the members of our extended family, to check in and see how everyone is doing. Left to right, our son Ben in San Francisco, my sister Anny in South Pasadena, Rebecca in LA, my mother in Portland, my other sister Teresa in Portland (same house as my mother, actually), Eve and me in Portland, my cousin Sophia and my aunt Anita, both in suburban Virginia, and Anny’s son Ivan in Boston. We are going to make this a weekly habit:

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As a work-from-home freelancer, my life hasn’t changed all THAT much. I do miss trips to the store and the library, but I’m basically doing what I did before. I’m still posting my biweekly series of instructional videos created in Adobe After Effects on my Patreon page. The most recent shows how to draw stairs in perspective:

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Here’s a sneak preview of the next video:

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I’m managing to do paying work as well. My friend Jonathan Dubay hired me to animate this webpage for his handwriting app:

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I have also been continuing to post old sketchbook drawings to my Patreon page, including a bunch drawn on a school trip to San Francisco in 1973. And it doesn’t get more San Francisco than seeing one of my artistic heroes, R. Crumb, playing music on the street:

 

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I started a new comics series just before the lockdown happened. DREAM STUFF is a nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness story based on elements from dreams I’ve been posting to Facebook for the past decade. The pages I’ve posted so far feature American presidents:

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This haiku comic I posted last week started as an exercise in pure randomness- copying photos that turned up on my Facebook feed over a printed-out perspective grid- but it somehow developed a quarantine theme:

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Another comic on Patreon also has a quarantine angle. It all started when a Facebookfriend named Ian J. Miller posted this:

“Murphy’s Law: I socially distanced myself as a freelance artist working from home for 10 years. Then when I decided I was tired of socially distancing I got a day job I really enjoy. Today marks one month since I started that day job and the office is closed and I’m now at home socially distancing again.

At least I have all this toilet paper.”

I posted a comment about how it’s difficult to draw on toilet paper, which got me to thinking that I shouldn’t make a categorical statement like that until I have actually TRIED to draw on toilet paper. My first attempt was a portrait of Ian from his Facebook profile pic, which turned out well enough that he asked me to send it to him.

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This strip posted to my Patreon page is my second effort:

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Observations: due to the fragility of the paper surface, I cannot use pencil, let alone make erasures. The paper is semi-transparent enough that I can do extremely loose tracing. All the drawing is done directly in ink with a brush. The technique I use is close to drybrush, with faint, subtle initial strokes building tones up gradually. A brush heavily loaded with ink will make a mark that blots and spreads out, so for the most part I keep the brush fairly dry. The brand is Scott, I believe, which has a surface with a tighter texture than some brands like Charmin which tend to fuzziness. l may experiment with watercolor or acrylic down the line.

From the top, the portraits are of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, French actress Julie Delpy, radio host Doctor Demento, and modern dance choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any new premiums for my Patreon page, so here’s a quarantine special. Any Patreon sponsor who requests one can get their own portrait on toilet paper, while supplies last (Eve actually found a package on a recent trip to the grocery store, so I think we’re in good shape). For those who are not yet Patreon sponsors, this may be an opportune time to sign up and see all the fabulous sponsor-only content I’ve been posting, including those pages from my 1976 sketchbook. Levels start at only $1 a month!

Patreon links:

New Comic: Dream Stuff

End Strip #187: Random Portraits From My DE Folder

Perspective Grid Comic: Random Haiku #2

Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: Stairs In Perspective (Patreon members only)

Sketchbook Drawing: R. Crumb Playing Banjo (Patreon members only)

Two Modern Love Illustrations For February

 

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I had two of my old Modern Love column illustrations from the New York Times repurposed for the podcast in February. From the website:

“How do you fall in love again after loss? How do you feel with all the complicated, conflicted emotions that come from grieving one person, and also opening yourself up to loving someone else?

That’s what Brendan Halpin explores in his essay. It’s called “Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive.”

It’s read by Terry Crews. He stars in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” which returns to NBC on February 6th.”

David Chelsea is reading: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

[image error] Terry Crews

“All parents have dreams for their kids. But what happens when you children have very different dreams for themselves?

Ronald Berger takes on that question in his essay, “I Saw A Playhouse, My Daughter Saw A Jail.” It’s read by Brian Cox. He recently won a Golden Globe Award for his performance as Logan Roy in the HBO show “Succession.”

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I was paid for both uses, but it was a bit of a bust- the first illustration didn’t actually appear on the website, making only a phantom appearance on the Google listings page, and the second did appear, but severely cropped. The culprit in both cases seems to be the horizontal format the podcast uses for illustrations on its website, which the vertically formatted originals fit poorly. Unfortunately I did not have enough foresight a decade ago when I drew these to anticipate that they would have a second life as vertical strips.

Listen to “Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive.”

Listen to “I Saw A Playhouse, My Daughter Saw A Jail.”

Here are the uncropped versions. First, “Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive.”:

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Second, “I Saw A Playhouse, My Daughter Saw A Jail.”:

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I usually have the original image file on disc, but this time I couldn’t find it, so I actually had to dig out the original art and rescan it. My method in these Modern Love pieces was to combine two pieces of original art, a pencil drawing on coquille board scanned at high contrast as line, and a watercolor painting.

 

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With a bit of color adjustment in Photoshop, the two pieces are combined to create the final art:

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02/02/2020

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Today, February 2nd, 2020, is Palindrome Day. It has been quite a while since I posted a new Palindrome strip (which are usually thought up by my clever son Ben) on my Patreon page, but here is a comprehensive list of the ones posted to date:

David Chelsea is watching: The Room

starring Tommy Wiseau

 

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[image error] Ben Celsi

End Strip #100: Palindrome Potpourri

End Strip #101: Palindrome Plethora

End Strip #102: Palindrome Parade

End Strip #103: Palindrome Pizzazz

End Strip #104: Palindrome Panorama

End Strip #106: Palindrome Picnic

End Strip #108: Palindrome-A-Palooza

End Strip #110: Palindrome Psychedelia

End Strip #112: Palindrome Perversity

End Strip #113: Palindrome Panoply

End Strip #114: Palindrome Paradise

End Strip #115: Palindrome Paterfamilias

End Strip #116: Palindrome Pictorial

End Strip #118: Palindrome Pornocopia (NSFW, and viewable only by Patreon supporters)

End Strip #117: Palindrome Paella

End Strip #119: Palindrome Palaver: The Needle Arts Edition

End Strip #120: Palindrome Panic!

End Strip #122: Palindrome Potluck

End Strip #123: Palindrome Pandemonium

End Strip #124: Palindrome Pizzicato

End Strip #125: Palindrome Poppycock

End Strip #126: Palindrome Pastorale

End Strip #127: Palindrome Polychrome

End Strip #129: Palindrome-A-Pocalypse

End Strip #136: Palindrome Pagoda

End Strip #137: Palindrome Paradox

End Strip #140: Palindrome Pizzajazz

End Strip #141: Palindrome Pastiche

End Strip #143: Palindrome Passionnelle

End Strip #146: Palindrome Polka

End Strip #149: Palindrome Picayune

End Strip #151: Palindrome Perfection

End Strip #154: Palindrome Polonaise

End Strip #155: Palindrome Placebo

End Strip #156: Palindrome Pianissimo

End Strip #157: Palindrome Playroom

Ben’s Notes

Palindrome Potpourri In Color

End Strip #158: Palindrome Permutations

End Strip #159: Palindrome Planet

End Strip #160: Palindrome Palisades

End Strip #161: Palindrome Pinnacle

End Strip #162: Palindrome Plangent

End Strip #165: Palindrome Politique

End Strip #166: Palindrome Puffery

End Strip #168: Palindrome Parfait

End Strip #169: Palindrome Package

End Strip #171: Palindrome Prismatic (NSFW)

End Strip #175: Palindrome Parabola

End Strip #178: Palindrome Polyhedra

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A lot of these palindromes are on the raunchy side, and I put the smuttiest of them in a single strip, which Patreon’s rules required me to put behind a paywall, so you’ll have to become a Patron to see the rest of this one (Not expensive. You can pledge at the $1 level, then quit right away):

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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: Never Tell Our Business To Strangers | With Ruth Wilson

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I’m usually more on top of this, but I’ve been extremely busy lately, so I let almost two weeks pass before I noticed the appearance of another of my Modern Love column illustrations from the New York Times, repurposed for the podcast. From the website:

“Never tell our business to strangers.” That’s what Jennifer Mascia was told growing up. But it wasn’t until she was an adult that she learned the reason why.

Jennifer’s essay is read by Ruth Wilson. Ruth has starred in “The Affair” and “Luther.” You can see her now in “His Dark Materials” on HBO.

David Chelsea is reading: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

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This one was fun because I made use of the family furniture, rug, and family photos, including Ben at the Empire State Building. The version on the podcast site is cropped, but you can see more in the original:

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In addition to the podcast use, the New York Times has been reprinting some early columns with my illustrations in the paper itself, presumably as a tie-in with the new streaming video series:

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I get a reuse fee for the podcast, but nothing for reprints in the paper itself, so if you want me to eat, you’ll have to hire me to draw something new.

Listen to the podcast here