Seahorses and Blades of Grass
A little bit about how I make the art for my comics when I'm exhausted
Hello, Intrepid Intellectuals!
Beauty and danger seem to flock together.
deep in the seaweed,
hiding from all predators
herd of seahorses
Today was long and hard. When I sat down to work on the newsletter, none of the haiku I had picked out for the week seemed like they wanted to come to life in a comic.
Whenever that happens, I start creating the comic first, and then I write a haiku to match what I’ve made. The problem today was I was sure I was too tired to start from scratch. So I didn’t.
I looked at the comics from the past week, and one of the panels stood out to me. It was from April 14th:
On the 14th, this picture was of supple blades of grass. Today, with a little additional work, they became seaweed stalks. I make my comics through a collage process instead of a normal drawing process. In the panel above, I drew the grass blades separately with watercolor pens and layered them on top of each other and over the sky that I had also drawn with watercolor pens. The layering was done digitally.
For today’s comic, I made some more seaweed-looking stalks using the same process, but with darker greens. I then put one of the many ocean wave images I’ve drawn over the top and made it mostly transparent. I threw in some bubbles to really sell this as an underwater scene.
When I finished the first panel in today’s comic, the idea for the haiku sprang to mind. I suspect the idea of seahorses came from my reading today's Noted by
. It's about Kurt Cobain's spiral notebooks and one of the stickiest details was Cobain's interest in seahorses because he saw them as a symbol of gender ambiguity.I already had the images for the seahorse herd and octopods in my archive. I found a delightful public-domain image of a seahorse fossil that I cut out and added as a small detail to a couple of the panels:
I love the process of making something new from different pieces of art and ephemera that were originally created for much different purposes than what I use them for. In my Weirdo Poetry collages, I only use public-domain images, images that I have licensed, or my own original artwork. But even when using my on original drawings, I usually chop them up and remix them to give them a new feel.
Once I had finished today’s comic, I was in a much better mood and as I always am, was grateful I took the time to create something.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
P.S. Yesterday I sent out links for two free zines. Here are the links again in case you missed them:
Hyperfixation: The Accidental Fire That Sparked a Deliberate Life
A herd of seahorses!
alot of work, but grateful seahorses!