Saturday, October 19, 2019

AN INKTOBER OFFERING FOR Y'ALL!

Yes, I know that the tradition for "Inktober" is that you're supposed to create one drawing per day for the entire month... but who's got the time anymore?! Particularly with the world being in the state that it's in. Attention is forever drawn elsewhere, and it seems as though time just gets away from you. I haven't even really had a chance to catch up on my reading (be it literature, non-fiction, or even comic books), or even my movie watching (I've had Midsomar cued up and ready to go for two weeks now). 

Thankfully, however, I recently decided that I needed to get my drawing chops back, in order to get ready to work on some new personal projects. So I took a crack at drawing the leader of Cult 45, the man some call Preznit Trump! 

Here's how it turned out...


So that's how my first effort turned out, using nothing but a blue ball-point pen and drawing freehand, without a guide image of any kind. The results were okay. I felt a little rusty, and it shows, but I was sufficiently encouraged to give it a second go, this time basing it on one of my most hated photographs of the crusty orange slug-man, creating a light pencil guide image first, and then drawing over it with three different sizes of technical pens. Then I imported it into Photoshop and did a tiny bit of enhancement using the Oil Paint overlay style to smooth it all out. 

Here's how THAT one turned out...
Not bad, eh? Gotta admit, I'm actually VERY pleased with how this one came out! So pleased am I, in fact, that I believe I will continue to practice drawing (particularly my problem areas, like backgrounds, architecture, vehicles, weapons) from hereon out, hopefully until I get good enough to finally tackle some illustrated stories I've been wanting to tell over the years!

Who knows? Maybe I'll even start doing commission art for money! Got a fetish you'd like to see visualized? Let me know and maybe we can work out a deal! Y'all know the email address.

WHO'S WHO IN TRUMP'S LATEST SNAFU


Friday, October 18, 2019

SUGGESTED READINGS AND VIEWINGS ~ FRIDAY, OCT 18


The above comic, which presents the "arguments" of Alex Jones' fascism-adjacent sub-moronic lackey PeeJay Watson pretty much verbatim, is by Matt Bors. He's pretty great. Check out more of his work at his website.

***

I COULDN'T HELP BUT NOTICE...

It's odd, isn't it?

Lie on a document to get your kid into a better school in a neighboring district, and you might end up getting arrested and cooling your heels in the hoosegow... especially if you're Black

Spend megabucks in an effort to bend the rules, or sweeten your spawn's CV in an attempt to score them a coveted spot at an Ivy League university, and you, too, might go to jail. Even if you're a celebrity!

But if you create a fraudulent "university" that bilks thousands of people out of millions of dollars in exchange for a big hairy box of Sweet Fuck All, except for the opportunity to be upsold even more worthless "programs" based not on their value, but on how much money you have in your bank accounts, or can get via various forms of credit... and you can become President of the United States of America. 

That's how sick, twisted, and generally fucked up things are these days. And it's got nothing at all to do with gay folks, or atheists, or the lack of guns in schools, or whatever stupid fucking bullshit it is that right-wingers believe might help to make things better.

Oh, hey, to all my Canadian friends and family... this Monday, you better get out and VOTE! And you better vote for the Liberal Party if you know what's good for ya! 

Heheh... I kid, I kid. But seriously... vote Liberal. Because independent auditors have proven that, when it comes to keeping election promises, Trudeau's record is actually pretty goddamn good.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

R.I.P. JOE WILSON (1950~2019)


Joe Wilson has passed away of multiple organ failure. He was 69 years old.

For those who don't remember, Joe was one of the good guys during the dark days of the Bush administration, and he and his family suffered greatly for it. I won't go into details here, because there's a lot to go over, and the link provided below does an admirable job of covering it all.

However, I will say that Joe's work formed a substantial part of the background to my own attempts to untangle the realpolitik of the day, for a substantial daily readership (at its peak, numbering in the hundreds of thousands), back when I was E.I.C. of the fondly remembered and now all-but-wiped-from-the-pages-of-history Daily Dirt newsletter, circa 1999-2006.  And my work was the better for it.

If you don't remember Joe, please read this obituary. At the very least, it will remind you that there are good guys in every milieu, though sometimes very well hidden, and that therein sometimes lies our only hope.