Our Little Editors: A Paw-fully Good Zine About Pets

Our Little Editors: A Paw-fully Good Zine About Pets

Digital artwork done in the style of a 14th century illuminated manuscript piece. A small calico cat is angrily plinking away at keys on a pipe organ, while passive-aggressive flowers curl and twist up to the cat's thoughts: "Mother!!!" the cat thinks, "Leave me alone. I am composing!!". The 'M' in 'mother' is lovingly painted and guilded like a medieval capital.

Our Little Editors Zine: Out Now!
My contribution to this pet zine is based off, of course, a medieval illumination. I swapped in my own cat for the striped white creature in the original, and expanded the floral treatment into some typography hanging overhead. Originally I did this as a one-off illustration for my own amusement, but then I heard about a small zine project and knew it could live there. I expanded the design and added more flowers and typography above the organ-playing cat.

Scan of a medieval illumination featuring a white cat angrily playing a little medieval pipe organ. Intense floral designs surround the cat.Hook of hours, France 15th century.
Bodleian, MS. Douce 80, fol. 106v

This zine is full of one-page observations about our pets. It spawned from a casual Friday Zoom hangout hosted by the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW). This zine was curated by Adrean Clark and Annie Mok. 32 artists banded together to make this zine. My work is featured on page 20.

As for the title, well…That was my suggestion! Like any good hands-on editor, my cats are destructive in the kindest of ways. This zine is freely available as a pdf file.

 

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Comics Tip

Digital self portrait of Adrean Clark, drawn by her. It's a simple but elegant sketch of herself with thick blue lines, holding her chin with one hand and going 'HMM!'Guest Tip by:
Adrean Clark

How to Organize a Zine
As I have no experience organizing zines, I decided to ask Adrean Clark about her experience compiling pieces and organizing them into a coherent collective whole. Here is what she has to say:

“Zines are meant to be a playground for ideas. They are different from books in that they allow you to experiment at a smaller scale with a broader range of finish (from scribbles to polished art).

If you’re making the contents of your own zine, then it’s a personal relationship between you and your reader. Your focus is on communicating with your audience. Anthology zines add extra layers to this relationship. You’ll be thinking about communicating within your own work, managing the contributors, and connecting with the audience.

A good anthology zine revolves around a clear concept. It has to be something that sparks interest for potential contributors – an idea that is easily explained in one or two sentences. What makes you excited to participate in a social project? What are some common ideas that could appeal to a broad range of artists? What would be interesting for people to read?

After the concept, decide on the format. Your contributors need to know what size, dpi, and medium to work in. Be detailed as to the deadline, where to submit the finished files, etc. If there is money involved, such as printing books, sales, etc. – it is extremely important to keep that information transparent with your contributors. Pay people on time.

I strongly suggest a signed agreement between you and the contributors, so that everyone is on the same page with expectations. You will spend a lot of time outside of your own contribution in communicating with people, so think carefully about how much time you want to commit to the project. It’s better to start with smaller collections and build up your skills from there than to try and swing for the fences with a huge Kickstarter-type project.

Personally, I enjoy doing anthologies because they’re a fun way to push my own work and socialize with other artists. It’s neat to see how people interpret ideas in their own ways. At the same time one has to be attentive to the dynamics of the project. It’s ok to scale things back or change gears if something isn’t working. Chalk it up to experience, and keep making art. :)”

Adrean Clark, ASL Deaf Author, Artist, and Advocate

So there you have it! To make a zine, make the zine. And remember to communicate with everyone who pitches in.

Care to read more?

How to Color the World

How to Color the World

From Inks to ColorsI completed the inks to Amphiox sometime in November. From there, I needed to figure out how to color a comic. I’ve done short comics in full color before. The thing with a one- or two-page micro-story is that each individual story can have its own...

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Where to Sell my New Zine?I recently compiled a selection of my Pandemic drawings into an art zine. The fun of zines is sharing them with someone who will read them. C'mon. Just read my stuff... Having exhausted my household of zine-readers, I decided to table at Geek...

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

Where to Stick This Knife?One fine morning a little over a year ago, I set up a silly poll on Twitter. I asked everyone, since we were all thieves in a treasure room, which item to steal. About thirty-seven thieves weighed in and decided upon, among other things,...

Want to chat about this?

A Dungeon of Little Dragons

A Dungeon of Little Dragons

My graphic novel characters from left to right: Pierre in his red robe and black cape with gold trim, Margo hovering as her barn swallow self near Canicula's nose, Canicula smacking his mace against one hand while decked out in sumptuous furs, and Lebeau, charging in from the right in their secondhand armor.

‘Fieschi Psalter’, Cambrai ca. 1290-1295.
Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, Walters Manuscript W.45, fol. 256v

Fox Dragon
Reynard? Is that you? You look a little different. A little foxier than normal. Please don’t tell me you’re the harbinger of the Revelation. What would Ysengrim think?

 

 

Digital artwork of an emu-like dragon, with a sheep's head on a long neck attached to a blue body with white spots down its back. It has a furry tail. The legs are gray and stripy with fur covering the toes and heels. A little spig of flowers springs from the heel of the dragon.‘The Maastricht Hours’, Liège 14th century British Library, Stowe 17, fol. 182v

Sheep Dragon
Leg warmers were a thing 650 years ago, I swear.

 

 

Luttrell Psalter, England ca. 1325-1340. British Library, Add 42130, fol. 178r

Lion Dragon
Look, sometimes an apex predator rocks the soft baby pinks and blues. There’s no reason to get mad about it. It’s almost like someone got the description of a lion spot-on right up to the shoulders and then gave up. Whatever — do you know how many people will leave the abbey to go look at a lion way down south in person? That’s right. Not many. So lions are pink and blue now, and they wear comfortable hats. Deal with it.

 

Re-draw of a medieval illustration of a long, snakey green dragon with red lion paws and pink wings with stripes. The dragon has antlers and flowers for a tail. On its head is an extremely phallic hat. There's no getting around it.pontifical, Avignon ca. 1330-1340
 Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. Diocèse 8, fol. 59r

Hat Dragon
I have so many questions about this dragon. One of those questions is not what the hat is supposed to be. I don’t want to know anything about this dragon’s hat. Instead, I will focus on this being the world’s tiniest dragon obsessing over its hoard of a single copper penny, which telekinetically floats nearby.

 

 

Digital artwork of a large, purple, four-legged dragon with human feet sharing an even purpler tongue with a yellow winged cat dragon. The purple dragon has six extra heads in its collar and they all look like they're whining. It's also wearing bunny slippers on its back feet. Its front feet have weird sandals that blend into its skin. The cat dragon, meanwhile, only has one extra head, which is on its long winding tail, and that head looks really annoyed.

Beatus of Liébana, Commentarius in Apocalypsin, Astorga 12th century
BnF, Nouvelle acquisition latine 1366, fol. 106v


What is Even Going on Here?!??

This must be the end of the world. That’s the only explanation I have. I didn’t feel like drawing the Schmooze in the corner there so this dragon gets a comfy pair of slippers.

Comics Tip

Designing a Dragon
Say you’ve got a story that calls for a dragon. The first thing to do is figure out what function that dragon serves in the story. Is it a pet? Is it a steed? Is it a friend? Is it a foe? Is it a wild beast? Is it bigger, or smaller, than a breadbox? Can it speak or coexist peacefully with humans? Does it represent something beyond being a mythical creature, such as the greed and cruelty of mankind, or the vengeance of the natural world?

Or do you just want a dragon that looks super cool*?

*Dragon ‘coolness’ as the result of this exercise may be subjective!

Digital artwork of three possible dragon silhouettes. The first is serpentine with bat wings and a snake tail, with little tiny paws and feet. The second is an upright armadillo with an ankylosaur tail. The third is some sort of bird with four wings and a feathery tail and frills on the head.

Step One: Silhouettes
Regardless of how big your dragon is, the first thing you’ll want is a Shape for it to fit into. Grab a marker and scratch down some rough poses and proportions for your dragon. Don’t worry about details at this point, just get a broad picture of its shape and size. Try to think about how the dragon would move. Maybe it’s very agile, or more of a tank. Can it fly? If not wings, include a visual of how it alights in the air. If it’s a more literal animal, it will look a bit different than if it’s the figment of a child’s imagination. Same for magical beasts having more leeway for fanciness and silliness than most real-animal analogues for dragons.

Digital artwork of three possible dragon heads, rendered as black scribbled silhouettes. The first is a smooth reptile. The second is more horselike with bumps and ears. The third is clearly a beaked creature with a feathered plume.

In addition tvo the overall body, it pays to figure out how the dragon’s head will look. Is it capable of expressing emotions, or does it need to express emotions within the story? Are its emotions clear or are they buried under the complexities of being a different species from humans? Explore that.

Digital artwork of one of the dragon silhouettes, with the armadillo body and beak head as our go-to. The dragon has been rendered three times, sporting a horn and T. rex claws in the first, fins in the second, and lots of wings and feathers and raptor claws in the third.

If you have a head shape and a body shape that you like, explore spines, fins, fur, and hair. Maybe the dragon has many limbs, or an unusual tail.

Digital sketch, done very quickly, of a comic page containing a dragon. It has three panels: One with a dragon trotting through the forest. The second panel is a closeup of the dragon's eye spotting something. The third panel is a breakout panel of the dragon discovering a baby and picking up, so it's a good thing I designed it to have opposable thumbs.

Step Two: Try it Out
My controversial take is that it pays to see if the overall shape and size of the dragon works in terms of the comic prior to doing any detail work outside of the silhouette. Try drawing the silhouette version next to characters and in environments you have planned for your story. This is also why concept art sometimes looks different from the actual comic. I think it’s important to get a sense of how the big parts of the creature function in the story prior to working out the finer details.

 

Step Three: Integument Refinement
While still thinking about how your dragon works in your comic’s world, experiment with showing how it sees, smells, tastes, and touches the world. A zoo is an excellent place to scope animals and observe how they’re built and how they move through the world.

Various photos of different scales. A lizard, an armadillo, an eagle's claw, a grasshopper, a betta fish, and a pineapple are all examples of scales that would look interesting on a dragon.
For instance, a dragon is not limited to reptilian scales. Check out some mammalian, avian, insectlike, and fish coverings, too. Maybe even plants!

Photos of the following animal attributes: A big eagle's eye, a dog's paw in a human hand, a skull of a theropod dinosaur, and whiskers on a white kitten's face.
Can your dragon see in the dark? Its eye shape will be different depending on how it senses the world around it. Think about its other senses. How sensitive is its skin? A large nasal cavity means it might be able to sniff prey from a long way away. If it has whiskers, maybe it loses its balance from losing those whiskers, like a cat does.

Photos of an alligator's closed mouth with tons of teeth sticking out, as well as a bear's paw with long black claws poking out.
How does the dragon protect itself, and what does it eat? This will affect tooth and claw shape, and whether it can grasp things like humans can.

Photos of fire, a field of white flowers, a big towering cloud, and the purple reaches of outer space with tons of stars.
Is the dragon ethereal? Maybe it has primordial elements mixed in, such as fire, flowers, clouds, or stars. Each body part tells a story about the rest of the creature, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘realistic’. It’s a dragon, after all. Have some fun for once in your life, gosh.

Three possible color schemes for my dragon design. For my overall silhouette I chose an upright armadillo dragon with feathery wings, a hairy chest, feathers on its claws, a beaked face and horn on its nose. Color scheme one is monochromatic blues, number two is yellows, greens, and oranges, and the third one is a pale grey dragon with red eyes and black tongue.

Step Four: Color!
Depending on what the rest of your comic looks like, you will need to decide whether your dragon sticks out or blends into the background. Stories involving dragons as ‘alien’ or ‘other’ may opt for brightly-colored dragons. Sneaky dragons will need camouflage. Pet dragons might be more likely to have specific color morphs, like the ones seen in snake or pigeon enthusiast communities.

Step Five: Revision
At any point in the process, a change might need to be made to the dragon’s design. Most changes simplify a design so that it’s easier to draw and color over and over again. Better to do that early before the dragon exists in dozens, if not hundreds, of panels. I personally find it more difficult to edit a design the further along it is in development. That’s why having extra versions of the design lying around are so useful. Those can offer easier solutions to big problems that come from an extreme revision to the design at the end of a project.

So there you go! There’s really no wrong way to go with a magical dragon because it doesn’t exist in the first place!

Creative commons dragon reference photos generously provided by pixabay.com.

Care to read more?

How to Color the World

How to Color the World

From Inks to ColorsI completed the inks to Amphiox sometime in November. From there, I needed to figure out how to color a comic. I’ve done short comics in full color before. The thing with a one- or two-page micro-story is that each individual story can have its own...

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Where to Sell my New Zine?I recently compiled a selection of my Pandemic drawings into an art zine. The fun of zines is sharing them with someone who will read them. C'mon. Just read my stuff... Having exhausted my household of zine-readers, I decided to table at Geek...

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

Where to Stick This Knife?One fine morning a little over a year ago, I set up a silly poll on Twitter. I asked everyone, since we were all thieves in a treasure room, which item to steal. About thirty-seven thieves weighed in and decided upon, among other things,...

Want to chat about this?

Aesop’s Crow Fable Comic

Aesop’s Crow Fable Comic

A two-page, full-spread comic that encompasses the entirety of Aesop's crow fable. Panel 1: This panel stretches across both pages. On the left page the crow flies. On the right page, the sun bears down. Panel 2: The crow sweats, mid-flight. Panel 3: The crow notices something below! An exclamation point is over his head. Panel 3: The desert island landscape offers up but a single, black-red-and-white lekythos jar. Panel 4: The crow alights the jar. Panel 5: The crow peers into the jar. Panel 6: Closeup of the crow's eye, seen through the jar's round hole. Panel 7: A divider bearing the pattern of the lekythos. Panel 8: A cut-out panel where the crow wobbles the jar back and forth in an effort to get the water inside. Panel 9: The crow appears to be looking at a skeleton nearby... Panel 10: The crow was actually looking at the pebbles around the skeleton. It picks one up. Panel 11: The crow drops the pebble in. Panels 12-15: The crow continues depositing pebbles in the jar until the sun goes down. Panel 16: The crow finally tastes the sweet liquid within the jar! Panel 17: The crow guzzles it like a fool. Panel 18: It's possible that the liquid inside of the jar wasn't water at all, as the crow drunkenly sings into the night.

During a Push/Pull Graphic Novel Workout zoom class I took with David Lasky and Greg Stump, I was challenged to tell an entire story using only two pages. In this ancient story, a thirsty crow must be clever and work hard to survive a harsh desert environment.

About Aesop
Yes, I know — if I fall into a research rabbit hole, I’ll never complete a comic. However, respecting the origins of this fable seemed like an interesting thing to do. Today we so often take these fables as always existing…something that just appeared, like magic, in our childhoods. Aesop was a real human being who used stories to gain favor from his fellow human beings, so I used his history as a pin to inspire the look of the overall comic.

This image from Aesop’s wikipedia article may or may not depict what Aesop actually looked like. Due to its easily editable nature, Wikipedia requires some double-checking, but the sources a Wikipedia article cites are always fairly solid. So, it’s okay to use Wikipedia as a starting point for research! I don’t have any plans for this short comic re: publication, so cursory research was fine for my purposes.

 


About the Setting
Aesop lived in ancient Greece, so I hunted for desert-like areas around that area and stumbled upon the island of Lemnos, Greece. It has lovely dunes, rocky outcroppings, and a fierce sun beating down. Perfect for dehydrating our crow-tagonist and forcing them to be clever. Maybe I’ll visit Lemnos someday!

 

About the Crow
Most people would opt for your standard black crow. I definitely have a fondness for the beaky fellows because a family of them sets up shop in my backyard every year. However, corvids come in a lot of shapes and sizes, so I looked into what sort of crow might be hanging out on a Greek desert island. I found the Greece-native Hooded Crow and felt like its duotone aesthetic was quite nice. The dramatic shifts in tone across its feathers look sort of like the lekythos’s design.

Also interesting: Crows actually do drop pebbles into water to raise the level of it! They are clever problem-solvers. Even back in ~600BCE (Aesop’s time), people were making accurate observations of nature that still hold up today. Perhaps I should do a followup comic of Aesop grumpily discarding all the pebbles a crow put into his lekythos.

 

About the Jar
I could have just grabbed an amphora and been done with it, but I needed something that could stand upright on its own so that the crow could interact with it more. I trawled the Smithsonian Open Access collection and came across this lekythos. A little bit of simplification on the design so it wouldn’t overpower our crow, and there we go! A period-appropriate pottery prop. Aesop himself might have touched one of these.

More photographs of this piece from the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) can be seen here. You’re welcome for the giant, sprawling rabbit hole that the site is!

 

 

 

Comics Tip

Use Stories with Expired Copyright to Jumpstart Your Comics Portfolio
Say you’re not a writer. All you want to do is draw. You could hunt down someone to write a story for you, or you could wait for scraps of scripts from friends or writer’s blogs. But what if I told you, there’s a place where all the greatest works of literature from the past have been carefully digitized and proofread as ebooks…entirely for free? And which can be adapted as comics, even comics that can be sold?

Check out Project Gutenberg!

Works you might recognize that have expired copyright:
The Wizard of Oz series
The Odyssey
The Works of Mark Twain*

Project Gutenberg even has a ‘random’ button that will fetch you a surprise work from their vast selection. Get cultured!

*Twain reportedly fought for perpetual copyright extensions, so this one is pretty ironic.

Care to read more?

How to Color the World

How to Color the World

From Inks to ColorsI completed the inks to Amphiox sometime in November. From there, I needed to figure out how to color a comic. I’ve done short comics in full color before. The thing with a one- or two-page micro-story is that each individual story can have its own...

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Where to Sell my New Zine?I recently compiled a selection of my Pandemic drawings into an art zine. The fun of zines is sharing them with someone who will read them. C'mon. Just read my stuff... Having exhausted my household of zine-readers, I decided to table at Geek...

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

Where to Stick This Knife?One fine morning a little over a year ago, I set up a silly poll on Twitter. I asked everyone, since we were all thieves in a treasure room, which item to steal. About thirty-seven thieves weighed in and decided upon, among other things,...

Want to chat about this?

Bear Berries: A COVID Comic

Bear Berries: A COVID Comic

Way back in March of 2020, we were just still getting used to wearing masks in public spaces. My partner Devin and I wore matching cat masks made by his mother to the local supermarket by the lake. The cashier offered us a silly conversation so I decided to immortalize it in comic form. Sometimes a person is very cute and funny for no other reason than to be human…or was he a bear, like, for real?!

I imagine most stories from the lost year of 2020 will not be very amusing. It was a year of quiet, sweeping change. My focus on levity here is to give the reader a quick respite before they must go about their day.

Art software: Photoshop
Lettering software: InDesign
Typeface: Cloudsplitter by Blambot; hand-lettering by me

Comics Tip

Have you ever had this situation? Lots of fussy objects in the same composition, each requiring its own specific color, but it doesn’t really matter which color? Manually picking different colors annoys me, so I messed with the brush settings in Adobe Photoshop.

Color Dynamics
There’s this Brush Setting in Adobe Photoshop called ‘Color Dynamics’ and if configured as seen above, the brush will choose different colors based on my current foreground color per every press of the stylus. For my own use, I keep the amount of brightness and saturation jitters pretty low, and turn hue jitter completely off. This means every time I lift the brush, and tap it back on the screen, I get a slightly different color — pretty much within the range of what I want, but I exercised zero brain power to get it. And if I don’t like the color, all I have to do is lift the stylus and press it back down for a different one. That’s how I blow through hundreds of not-very-important objects that still need their own color identities. Thanks, computer!

 

“What’s a Foreground Color?”
I’m glad you asked. It’s the color represented by the box in front, and the color that reliably comes out of your brush when Color Dynamics aren’t active. If you check ‘Foreground/Background’ jitter in the Color Dynamics menu, your brush will randomly select colors in between the two colors defined here.

 


If you’d like to try Color Dynamics for yourself on the same panel I did, or create your own strategies for dealing with situations like this, feel free to grab this Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) coloring panel and pop it into the coloring program of your choice. I’d love to see what you do!

 

Bonus chaos
Try ticking ‘Apply Per Tip’…I dare you…

Care to read more?

How to Color the World

How to Color the World

From Inks to ColorsI completed the inks to Amphiox sometime in November. From there, I needed to figure out how to color a comic. I’ve done short comics in full color before. The thing with a one- or two-page micro-story is that each individual story can have its own...

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Where to Sell my New Zine?I recently compiled a selection of my Pandemic drawings into an art zine. The fun of zines is sharing them with someone who will read them. C'mon. Just read my stuff... Having exhausted my household of zine-readers, I decided to table at Geek...

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

Where to Stick This Knife?One fine morning a little over a year ago, I set up a silly poll on Twitter. I asked everyone, since we were all thieves in a treasure room, which item to steal. About thirty-seven thieves weighed in and decided upon, among other things,...

Want to chat about this?